LIFE - POETRY-YOGA
Life - Poetry -Yoga
PERSONAL LETTERS
by
AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)
Vol. 2
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1995
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Paiatino)
© Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A. Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
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Your beautiful New-Year card enshrining your soul's hope and aspiration has been lying in front of me for quite a while. Whenever I looked at it my heart warmed up and wished to reply. The picture it carried - the tall tree stretching its branches towards the monastery - expressed my own mind. The branches lower down seemed to lift the building right from its foundation and pass it on to the upper boughs to bear it higher than its present height. All the fine things of the past need not only a new vision at the top but also a new impulse at the bottom. There is a greater sky than seen so far and a greater earth than felt up to now. The sense of a sky hidden within the very dust and the intuition of an earth waiting among the clouds - it is this double future that is calling us today.
The amazing events all over middle and eastern Europe are to be understood as pointing to such a future. What has burst out there should not be taken merely as a failure of totalitarian Communism and a justification of democratic Capitalism. Freedom, of course, is the general cry and all that the Berlin Wall symbolised has crumbled down by that cry's exhilarating resonance, but it is really a portent of a breaking equally beyond the old constraints and the old licences. A certain discipline within the one system and a certain elan within the other have to join together and push past both the systems to realise something more fundamental than the supposed equality of the Eastern bloc, something more expansive than the so-called liberty of the Western. And this something is, as Sri Aurobindo said long ago, the third term of the triple slogan raised in the French Revolution which marked with a blood-stained glory the difficult birth of the modem world.
Not "Liberty", not "Equality" but "Fraternity" is the true summons of the future - the instinct in us of the one Father Heaven, the one Mother Earth, linking all of us at the source
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- the feeling within of the single Self that has gone forth and become the multitudinous universe. Thus alone, by the upsurge of the ideal of an inherent union of souls, an intrinsic spiritual brotherhood, can a genuine liberty which knows its own limits be established, an authentic equality which keeps its eyes open to distinctions and differences be practised - a state exceeding the old opposing 'isms. To make a pun, the isms of yesterday should be seen as wasms today and a novel drive felt to render actual the dream of fraternity which got lost in the nightmares of liberty and equality in the forms attempted by men in whom the inner being could not have its full say in the outer.
My notion that the crumbling of the Berlin Wall should direct us beyond the values of the 'isms cherished by the modern world finds a supporting sign in the strange phenomenon that the central power in the new prospect disclosed today is an apparently atheistic product of a culture oriented towards materialist well-being: Mikhail Gorbachev of Soviet Russia. He has always struck me as a Vibhuti in disguise, an instrument of the Divine who does not know what force is impelling him. Though an atheist, he does not shun religious movements, but this non-shunning does not mean any sympathy for them: by not belonging to any of them yet letting them exist it is as if his atheism were a move away only from the religions of the past. Though a Marxist, believing in a materialistic view of history and with a stress on economic welfare, he has thrown his country's doors wide open to the winds of the non-Communist world, yet without subscribing to that world's Capitalist principles. Unknowingly he is a message from the time to come and his denying of the Divine is itself guided by the Divine. Through him, I think, we have what I may dub an indirect and undefined fore-glimpse of the Aurobindonian Age's adventure to awake the earth to its own secret heavenliness through a spirituality which overpasses all religions while fulfilling their inmost essence by a pull beyond the versions that have failed this essence.
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For what indeed is this essence? An attainment of utter Godhead as Teacher, Leader, Sustainer, Lover when there will be realised a mind that can compass all knowledge instead of groping for it step by step, a life-force that can meet every challenge and provide the key of success to all enterprises, a body that is immune to disease, decay and death, a soul that is in bliss independently of all objects and circumstances and is in spontaneous harmony with everyone and everything - in short, a completely Godlike existence in time and space. The extant religions have dreamt, each in its own manner, of a Kingdom of God here and now, but never known how to achieve it and have therefore fixed their eyes finally on a supraterrestrial paradise or a transcendental Nirvana. The Supreme Power that can consummate the dream it had itself planted in the evolving consciousness on the earth has at last been clearly visioned and experienced on its Himalayan altitude and set working in the human sphere by Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual partner the Mother. A promising present and an assured future they have given us by means of their Integral Yoga with the helpful prodigality of their own vivid examples.
(21.1.1990)
I have carefully re-read those lines on page 445 of Savitri (Centenary Edition) strikingly reminding us of Christ with their references to Gethsemane and Calvary, bleeding brow, crucifixion, two thieves and the last words "It is finished." We both saw that if the verse immediately following these lines -
Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls -
had not been there we would have had a consistent picture reminiscent of the final act in the life of Jesus.
May I now point out that there is an explanation ' line which looks quite incongruous. Up to the ey
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He has trod with bleeding brow the Saviour's way -
Sri Aurobindo is considering the Saviour under the aspect of the story of Christ going to his death on the Cross. But the very mention of "the Saviour's way" shows that he is using this story as a powerful illustration of a spiritual phenomenon wider than it. And after the full stop at the end of the line I have just quoted he passes from the particular aspect to the general case. For the next line is:
He who has found his identity with God...
This "He" is any Saviour and what follows the line has the aspect of a generality though not necessarily forgetting the particular aspect. Thus the reference to the Saviour being "hewn, quartered on the scaffold" is not unnatural or irrelevant: such a death is also part of the Saviour-history. The line in which this phrase occurs leads on to another immediately after it in which, as I have said, the Christ-aspect is not forgotten:
His crucified voice proclaims, "I", I am God."
But "crucified" here is metaphorical while still keeping a link with the Christ-reminiscence.
Looked at thus, the entire passage starting with the Christ-aspect and ending with this reminiscence and bringing in the middle the cruelty of the scaffold impresses me as a triumph of poetic art in which everything essential is vividly woven together with an eye at once to a famous particularity and to a comprehensive generality. Perhaps the comprehensiveness would have been complete if one more line like the one I have proposed had been inserted and the close had run:
Bound to the stake and set aflame or else
Hewn, quartered on the scaffold as he falls
His crucified voice proclaims, "I, I am God."
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If Sri Aurobindo had shown me the passage in private I with the freedom he generously permitted and even expected might have suggested to him to compose an extra line about the Saviour being burned at the stake.
As regards your highly original idea of what must have been really the last words of Jesus on the Cross, nameiy, "I, I am God" - as caught by Sri Aurobindo's vast vision - the aspect of generality which I have presented would not nullify it but lead to it indirectly. For, what Sri Aurobindo says about all Saviours must apply to Christ. There is even a special touch here, however generalised, in regard to him in the adjective "crucified" qualifying "voice". So, according to me, your contention can stand. All the more since Sri Aurobindo has used the last words from John's Gospel - "It is finished" - which show Jesus in full control and conscious of the Divine Plan rather than in a state of dereliction as suggested by Mark's report and, after him, Matthew's: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" - "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - an echo of the beginning of Psalm 22.
The words, "I, I am God", are, as you yourself said, typical of the Sufis whose doctrine and realisation are a blend of Islam and Vedanta and the Bhakti cult. Their crowning word is identity with God. In Christ's manifold declarations the Sufi element (which in the language current in the New-Testament period would be called "Gnostic") is most prominent in the words put into his mouth by John's Gospel: "I and my Father are one." Richard Burton, the famous nine- teenth-century translator of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights which he entitled A Thousand Nights and a Night, a version Sri Aurobindo intensely admired, wrote a long poem called The Kasidah with an Arabian atmosphere. Among the lines I remember from it are these two:
"I am the truth, I am the truth," we hear the God-drunk
gnostic cry:
"The microcosm abides in me, eternal Allah's naught
but I."
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Now for the other lines you quoted to me from page 343 of Savitri, a passage which is part of Aswapati's long speech to the Divine Mother:
A power arose out of my slumber's cell.
Abandoning the tardy limp of the hours
And the inconstant blink of mortal sight,
There where the Thinker sleeps in too much light
And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye
Hearing the word of Fate from Silence' heart
In the endless moment of Eternity,
It saw from timelessness the works of Time.
Overpassed were the leaden formulas of the Mind,
Overpowered the obstacle of mortal Space:
The unfolding Image showed the things to come.
To my understanding, we have here a new consciousness emerging from the profoundly in-drawn state ("slumber's cell") reached by Aswapati. It goes beyond the usual process of time and, from its thought-transcending poise in Eternity's all-knowing Silence, foresees the future unrolling and fore-hears the divine decrees of Fate. What the Eye and the Ear of Superconsciousness catch is, as the subsequent passage shows, the portent of a world-upheaval and then the arrival of a new race of world-transformers.) The lines which I have cited bear some resemblance to a stanza in Sri Aurobindo's jivartmukta:
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.1
(14.1.1990)
1. Part of the interesting reply to my letter may be reproduced with advantage:
"Thank you for the long and studied note with regard to the subjects we discussed together....
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I have received with great pleasure your letter, whose beginning - "It is very early in the morning, brahmo muhurta" - reminds me of the beginning of Savitri:
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
for there too the time when the temple-bells ring in order to mark the brahmo muhurta, the symbolic moment for the Powers of Light to resume their workings, is suggested and rendered more specific by the lines:
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone
In her unlit temple of eternity...
In the situation to which you refer, one of the Gods was already up and doing, somewhat forestalling the brahmo muhurta. Please don't think my allusion to you sub specie deitatis - "under the deific aspect" - is just a joke. Whoever has had his Psychic Being awake enough to set his eyes in the direction of Sri Aurobindo and of the Mother has remembered his divine origin and is on the way to realising it and to standing, if not on a par with the great Cosmic deities, still at least in the company of glorious Godlings.
Quite consonant with your waking up early this morning is your question prompted by the Mother's words to you at your first interview with her. After your childlike patter to
"As to the 'crucifixion' lines, what you have explained now is what I had, myself, felt all along. But only recently the apparent incongruity of that one line came before me and 1 came to you about it. Yes, the addition of some such line as you suggest would have made it quite clear. However, it is now well understood.
"Regarding the other lines, your explanation seems rather involved, because I suppose it is a mental one. On my part, I find an intrinsic simplicity in Savitribut not of a mental kind. There is an inner understanding but not one I can put into words. Anyway, thank you for this also. It does help.
"Your quotation from the "The Kasidah' and from Sri Aurobindo's 'Jivan-mukta' are very revealing."
Udar
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her about your life up to that moment, she said: "It shows that your Psychic is awake." Your question to me - "What exactly does it mean?" - is also childlike. For it can only suggest that, though you know the Psychic Being by actual experience, you have not formulated its wakefulness in mental terms. Or if I go by your second question - "Can a Psychic which is once awake ever draw back?" - I may suppose that whatever mental formulation you may have does not take into account the full state of affairs in the course of the spiritual life. Let me touch upon both your perplexities,
I would say briefly that the Psychic Being in us is that which passes from life to life through the long series of rebirths. It is the Immortal in the mortal, gradually evolving representative of the Supreme Spirit in the terms of mind, life-force and body. In general it moves spontaneously towards what our idealistic literature calls "the True, the Good, the Beautiful." This trio forms the goal of our philosophical, ethical and aesthetic life. Religion sees it in the light of a divine Presence and there the Psychic Being tends to go directly rather than indirectly towards the object of its aspiration. But even there its intrinsic movement does not find its full play, for our life gets only an aura of this inmost soul: the full substance and form of it is still behind a veil. Only when we take to a radically Godward living, start sadhana in a one-pointed way does the Psychic Being have a chance to come forth into open action. Then whatever of it was awake as in your case gets a full chance to get out of bed, as it were, and walk about in the sphere of mind, life-force and body.
Now this does not mean that it will keep walking about all the while. Not quite at home in the outer sphere and unfamiliar with the various forces there of a mixed sort it can draw back time and again to its bed. You mustn't think it has gone to sleep once more. But as long as it is reclining it can feel drowsy and fail to catch wholly the Spiritual Sunlight into which it formerly emerged. However, in spite of the
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misting over of the eyes, there is no question of real withdrawal. And let me assure you that it is not only my dear friend who can be afflicted with drowsiness. All the children of our Mother experience it now and then. Even Nolini, on occasion, must have been heard yawning and seen drooping his eyelids. At present - November 1987 - I can't quite say "Yawned" in our hearing with regard to another of our notable sadhaks, Champaklal, for that might break his 12-year old mauna, voluntary muteness! Yet some sign of semi-somnolence of soul must have been there at times for him too. In any case, though we may seem to recede from the Mother, she never recedes from us. Once she has seen our Psychic Being peep out, she is always with us, sweetly smiling at its fluttering eyes and helping them to keep wide open for good. So never let a cloud of depression add to whatever little shadow may flit because of common human frailty across the God-gleam in your gaze.
Especially since the Mother, at the close of your first interview with her, has put her hand on your head, blessed you, picked up a flower kept in a plate by her side and pronounced, "This is Successful Future", you should banish all doubt over things to come. Go happily forward and if you like to have my company, it is always there for the asking. Even without asking, you will have it, for a barrierless warmth flows incessantly between Amal and his cherished friend.
(14.11.1987)
There is a phrase in Savitri which, I am told, puzzled you considerably when you were in India. It occurs in the context of "ideal Mind" on "peaks" beyond our imagination. The nature of this Mind and of its workings are described:
In an air which doubt and error cannot mark
With the stigmata of their deformity....
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Dreaming its luminous creations gaze
On the Ideas that people eternity.
In a sun-blaze of joy and absolute power
Above the Masters of the Ideal throne
In sessions of secure felicity.2
I understand that in the last three lines you failed to find a grammatical structure: what is the subject and where is the verb? I believe the cause of your perplexity was chiefly the word "throne", while the word "Above" added to the bafflement. Though one did not know what was done "In a sun-blaze", the sun-blaze seemed to be above the Masters of a throne which was qualified by an adjective somehow capitalised: "Ideal."
Nothing could be farther from the actual sense. In a few places in Savitri Sri Aurobindo uses "throne" as an intransitive verb - a practice rare but allowed in English - equivalent in meaning to "sit on a throne" or, in general, "sit in state, as on a throne". And "Above" here, is not a preposition governing "the Masters": it is an adverb denoting that "the Masters" are high up in "a sun-blaze". Nor is "Ideal" an adjective: it is a noun. Sri Aurobindo is speaking of "the Masters of the Ideal".
I recollect at least two other instances of the intransitive "throne" in Sri Aurobindo's epic. One is very much as in the instance which puzzled you; but with a more self-explaining context:
A divine intervention thrones above.3
The other has clearly the past tense of the same verb in a line standing by itself:
Life throned with mind, a double majesty.4
2.Centenary Ed.,Vol. 28, p. 261: lines 16-17, 22-26.
3.Ibid., p. 58: 34.
4.ibid., p. 126: 4.
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2
Your letter has been in hiding for quite a number of days, but its place in my drawer did not mean that it was ever forgotten. Always my mind dwelt on it and it was securely lodged in my heart no less than in my drawer. Never to forget that it had been set aside for a less crowded time is really not to have set it aside at all in the true sense of the word. If, as Milton often says in Paradise Lost, small things may be compared to big ones, this morning when I have pulled your letter out I am reminded of what the Mother once told me after her son Andre's first visit to the Ashram. She said in effect: "Truly speaking, Andre was never absent. All through the years it was as if he were here but behind a screen. Now he has come out and become visible. That is the only difference in the way he has been present in the Ashram."
Of course, in Andre's case it was not just a matter of the Mother's constantly remembering him: it was also a matter of Andre's own incessant remembrance of the Mother. I am inclined to believe that something similar I may dare to say even in the case of your letter. When you write to me it is not mere words that come over. Your own self seems to get projected in the form of white paper and blue ink: they carry in intense symbol-suggestion the twofold aspect of your life -the purity of the in-world that is your natural ambience and the beauty of the over-world that is supernature softly expressing itself within that upward-looking soul-secrecy.
With this vision of you in my eyes I am not surprised at all at the unhappiness you feel whenever you notice "the paucity of kindness in the human heart". You have very finely and aptly said: "We always pray to the Divine for Grace but we are hardly gracious to fellow human beings." Yes, when we receive the "kindly light" which Newman invoked in a famous poem to "lead" him on, surely it is not meant to be looked upon with a miserly mysticism. Not that
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we should lose ourselves in a philanthropic frenzy as if service in any way to mankind were our object: we must never forget that God-realisation is our aim and what we have to bring forth in the midst of mankind is God-manifestation or rather what has to flow out of us is God manifesting Himself. This outward act of His has to be through a psychic spontaneity and not through a mind-managed intervention, though the mind's role of giving intelligent support is quite acceptable.
I may observe that spiritual graciousness towards fellow human beings comes more easily to a certain type of sadhak. By and large, there are two types. One has a marked capacity to go inward and meditate for a long time. When the born meditator emerges from his spiritual cell he is a good sight, for some aura of inwardness clings to his face. But often, instead of being calm and patient with people, as do the best of this type, he shows irritation with them and is eager to give them short shrift.)At the worst we have the example which the Mother once gave. Haven't I already written to you about it before? She said there was a chap who could get lost in meditation for hours. One day, while he was deeply interiorised, someone knocked at his door - hard enough to draw him out. The master of meditation rushed to the door, opened it and exclaimed: "You damn fool, don't you know I am meditating? How dare you disturb me? Off with you!" And the door was banged in the face of the unfortunate intruder. The Mother commented: 'This sort of meditation is worth nothing."
The second type of sadhak does not do much of set meditation. But whatever little is done by him serves to invite the inner to come out and be present as a quiet active force in his day-to-day life. Rarely, if ever, does he flare up, and in his contact with people the out-drawn inner being flows like a warm stream towards them bearing an unspoken benediction from the smiling Splendour that is the Mother and the silent Grandeur that is Sri Aurobindo. This kindness, this helpfulness is not really personal, it is only channelled by the
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giver and it is directed chiefly towards awakening in the receiver the hidden soul, the secret eater of a heavenly honey, the arch-healer by whose touch all physical handi-caps and difficuleties , all psychological hardships and entanglements get lightened and a soft bliss bathes the whole being.
The danger to which this type is exposed is the proclivity to throw oneself out too much, believing that the soft bliss will envelop all his doings. One must learn to draw a line, check the over-exteriorising tendency, stay clear of certain activities that are out of tune with the Dweller of the Depths who has graced with his presence the surfaces of life.
The ideal sadhak would combine the essences of both the types. To show us how this can be done we have the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. The Mother's natural movement seems to have been profoundly meditative. Again and again we have seen her withdraw into a trance. Occasionally she would be lost in the inner world for hours. Of course, there too she would be at work and was not just absorbed in self-beatitude. In fact, beatitude was always with her and there was no need to withdraw into it. What I am referring to is the tendency to be indrawn repeatedly, away from the pulls of the outer existence. But we have watched also how the Mother tirelessly toiled in the outer existence for our sake. It was as if Sri Aurobindo put her forward to face that existence while he remained behind in a sublime solitude of the Spirit. And yet the actuality is that throughout his intense exercise of the spiritual life Sri Aurobindo seldom shut his eyes! "Exercise" is indeed an appropriate word, for he at one time used to spend seven or eight hours walking up and down his room. I should know this best, for I occupied two old rooms of his in what was called the Guest House. He had lived there for about six years" and I had the tremendous luck to spend nine and a half years in that place. By his walking across the floor he had dug a semi-winding path to the Supermind. It had been plastered over with cement before my time. But the sign of the great passage still stood out. I
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used to follow it with my own feet, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mighty goal he had reached! The glimpse was never caught, but I would feel exhilarated by imagining myself in the atmosphere, if not of Sri Aurobindo's Supermind, at least of that magnificent mind of his with
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
as a -Miltonic verse seems anticipatively to have figured it. Perhaps by the attempt to imitate his "exercise" of the spiritual life I got a far-away touch of the way he lived. For the point is that he who to all appearance remained behind, with the Mother put in the forefront, appears to have scaled spirituality's Himalayan altitudes and plumbed its Pacific profundities with his eyes wide open, apparently looking all the time at the non-Himalayan non-Pacific common levels of land and sea. Without plunging into unearthly trance, those eyes held perpetually
The light that never was on sea or land.
Thus in the Mother and Sri Aurobindo we have with a touch of paradox in both instances the blending of the two types raised to the nth degree. They set us the ideal. Till we come within some distance of it, let us develop whatever type is most congenial to us without falling into the perils of its exaggeration. I for one have mostly the bent of the second type - no doubt very poorly achieved in spite of my persistent effort. At least one shade of it has not been too far off, so that when people appear at various odd hours at my door and apologetically say, "We hope we are not disturbing you", I am able to quip: "What you are saying is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I am so easily disturbed?"
Now to some other topics in your letter. You are right to think that callousness to people's sufferings does not imply the capacity in oneself to suffer courageously. Cruel men are mostly cowards. The example you have given of the noto-
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rious Eichmann is very pointed. As you recount, he who had sent hundreds to the horrors of the Gas Chamber exclaimed when he was caught by his Israeli pursuers in Latin America: "Oh, do not kill me, do not kill me!" You have doubted whether a monstrous person like Hitler could ever have been courageous. What distinguished him was the boldness of his ventures, the confident strokes of his strategies. We have learned from our Gurus that these masterful acts were inspired by an occult Asuric force. They do not necessarily bespeak a courageous personal nature. His final suicide when defeated may show a desperate courage. But I suspect that he would not have been driven to it if the Russian army had not been his potential captor. He took his own life because he dreaded being the prisoner of Communists -especially when they were headed by Stalin whom he had betrayed. Most probably he would have surrendered alive to the Americans. Perhaps one may ask: "Why could he not have escaped by air with his girl-friend Eva Braun?" My conjecture is that he knew that if he had tried to do so his followers might have shot him for a coward. He preferred to die by his own hand and be considered a hero. But can one be a hero when no course other than suicide is left to one?
I am touched by your intimating to me the "secret" of what you did when I was sitting with shut eyes close to Lalita's lifeless body. Your standing quietly by my side for a-few minutes was a very sweet gesture. Yes, we were not on terms of intimacy at the time but you seem to have had a presage of things to come. For I am sure it was a movement not only of natural kindliness but also of spontaneous affection. You have wondered what my state of mind was. Of course I was unaware of my surroundings.What I was cherishing in my heart with shut eyes were two experiences. One was the observation of an exquisite beauty that had appeared on Lalita's face some time after her death. It was as if her psychic being were still active within her physical frame and could somehow play the artist with the lines of her face, turning the preceding expression of peace to a hint of delicate
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delight at the subtle sight of the Divine Mother. I remember calling Richard Hartz's attention to this sweet change. The other experience was caught from a large picture of the Mother hanging behind the bed on which Lalita had been laid. This picture is now in my own room, hanging behind me as I am typing my letter to you. When I looked at it intently on that late evening, it conveyed to me most forcibly the message: "All you have done in your Yogic life is not enough. You have to change still more radically. Rise above the various weaknesses which are lingering in you. Do not waste any of the time that is left to your life." Along with the sense of Lalita's soft beauty, I was concentrating on the depth-opening power of the picture's silent command. 1 gave so much importance to the command that I requested Dyuman, who was attending to the general arrangements, to let me take the picture to my own place, so that its call to me to surpass myself might always hold my attention. Indeed it does so every day as I sit for hours in a chair facing it from the other side of my working room. Below it is a picture of Sri Aurobindo in his chair with his face fully fronting us. This picture is not the same as the one which is popular and in many people's possession. There the eyes are a little lowered. Here they are looking straight ahead as though with a prophetic certitude in them of a glorious future for the world.
(7.2.1990)
Thank you for the note, both wise and warm, of the 19th, congratulating me on the 36th anniversary of my final settlement in the Ashram. Yes, you are luckier than I in not having left even physically the Ashram once you had stepped into it on the 16th of the same month, exactly the same number of years ago! What I can say on my behalf is that, unlike the departure in 1938 which meant resuming the ordinary life though still without a snap of the inner link between our Gurus and me, my second home-coming was of
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a different nature. Even when it admitted a few visits to Bombay, it was always for work connected with the family there or, on the last occasion, for a cataract-operation, and never was there the idea to start again a non-Ashram life. So in that sense the poem I am going to quote speaks for both of us. I have myself a longer piece on the same theme which the Mother read with approval but I can't at the moment lay my hand on it. Here are the excellent lines of Arjava (john Chadwick before he joined the Ashram):
New Country
Precarious boat that brought me to this strand
Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,
Till not one rib my backward glance can find -
Down to the very keelson they shall bum.
Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;
Fain to touch with feet an unimaginable land....
The gates of false glamour have closed behind;
There is no return;
Arjava is rather compact in his language and subtle in the turns of his expression. So perhaps a few elucidatory words from me to you would be in place. "Precarious boat": we come to the spiritual life, the "New Country" of the title, through events and circumstances that have both a forward and a backward tension: hence the "boat" is "precarious"-that is, dependent on chance, uncertain, insecure, exposed to danger. It is also a possible means to go back, a temptation for a reversal of the voyage. Therefore it needs to be destroyed wholly, from the front part ("stem") to the hind part ("stern") - subjected to the fire of the soul's aspiration, the inner flame that rises upward: its horizontal body offered up to the "pinnacles" which that psychic intensity forms by its aspiring movement. But the destruction is done not only because the boat may tempt one to retrace one's way: there is
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also a firm resolve, a command from the inmost being. That is the suggestion of "Shall". And the totality of the destruction is driven home by mention of the boat's ribs. A rib is one of the curved timbers of a boat to which planks are nailed. "Not one rib" will escape the fire, which means that fire will consume all the ribs. It is with the sense of all of them that the next line uses the plural number "they". Not content with saying this, the poet goes on to say that they shall burn "Down to the very keelson". The phrase points to the sheer bottom of the boat. "Keelson" or "kelson" is the line of timber fastening a boat's floor-timbers to its keel. A keel is the lowest piece of timber running lengthwise in a boat, on which the framework of the whole is built.
Parenthetically I may add that in poetry "Keel" denotes in general a boat or ship by the figure of speech called synecdoche in which a significant part does duty for the whole. Before Keats gave the world those wonderful lines -
...magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn -
he had written "keelless" instead of "perilous", but, feeling some lack in both suggestion and sound, brought in the epithet which, instead of telling us that the waters concerned were barren of ship-traffic, hints to us that ships could hardly cross watery expanses such as these. Our imagination rather than the merely observant mind in us is touched and stirred. Besides, the second foot is converted from a two-syllabled iamb into a three-syllabled glide-anapaest which conveys in a subtle manner the threatening tremble of the seas, and the conversion not only catches up three of the several consonantal sounds which stream hauntingly through the lines -m, n, f, s, r ,l - but, along with r, l and s, it provides an echo to the p of the previous line's "opening", thus enriching the music of the couplet. I feel that if "keelless" had remained in place of "perilous" the two lines would have just fallen short of the category in which Sri Aurobindo puts them: the sheer
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unclassifiable "inevitable", the ultimate voice of poetry, beyond the inevitabilities of the four styles he defines: the adequate, the effective, the illumined, the inspired.
Now back to Arjava from Keats - from the latter's "perilous seas" to the former's "unreal sea-line". This expression points to the horizon which is not a real terminus to the voyager but proves illusory as one sails further and further. One "yearns" towards it in pursuit of a terminus. Now that the voyager has disembarked on a marvellous land which surpasses every possibility of imagination he is so glad ("fain") that all the old lure of distances that keep deceiving one is lost.
Next comes the grand finale. The poet has turned his back on the sea-line. Behind him lies, shut off for ever, the "false glamour" of the ordinary human existence always searching for beauty and happiness but finding only deceptive and transitory appearances. Never more will he be attracted by them. Their call is over. And this profound finality is branded upon our minds by those few sweeping words: "There is no return." Mark how short is the line they make -compared to the preceding seven. Five of them - 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 -are pentameters. One - 5 - scans most naturally as an Alexandrine. The next, as if prepared by this length of six feet, flows into seven as though in answer to a sense of a once-faraway yet now-reached region's vistas, lengthening on and on, of a heart-enrapturing future. It is a fine play of expressive art to introduce this substantial variation. But the variation is still part of a pattern to set off the shortness of the eighth verse. The phrase - "There is no return" - gets an absoluteness even technically by there being no return here to the long measures we have met before. The utter end of all the past, the end of all utterance of it, are here. The "unimaginable land" on which the poet has planted his feet is evoked by this two-footed concluding phrase as a sudden short-cut to the Ineffable
Shakespeare in the famous Hamlet-soliloquy wrote of death as
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The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns....
Arjava points to the Immortal Consciousness, the goal of the spiritual seeker, as the bourne from which no traveller would want to return. In "New Country" the spiritual seeker in Arjava has expressed the action of the Supreme on the human soul's ancient cry which the Brihadaranyaka Upa-nishad has caught:
From Appearance lead us to Reality,
From Darkness lead us to Light,
From Death lead us to Immortality.
"New Country" is a very powerful, very perfect poem working out its details of the inner life in a vein at once visionary and concrete within a small compass which is yet packed with vivid significances and leaves nothing essential unsaid - a small compass raised to the nth degree of effectiveness by the markedly short ending to a run of seven long lines
(20.2.1990)
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3
Your experience, during four or five months, of seeing Sri Aurobindo smile at you from his photograph while you have been concentrating on it after a whole clay's tiring work, has certainly a truth in it. Not that the picture itself undergoes a change but, since in every picture of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother the presence of them has been instilled, this presence responds and superimposes its gesture on your sight or, rather, on the consciousness behind your seeing, through the features in the representation.
I too have had a response from the photo of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother. Just a few days back the big picture of the Mother which hangs on the wall just opposite the chair in which I usually sit spoke quite a lot to me through her eyes which seemed to move. Actually the picture belonged to Lalita and I asked Dyuman to let me have it because while I was sitting next to Lalita's dead body the picture spoke to me very forcefully through its eyes and the message made a deep difference in my inner life. At both times there was no precise verbal formulation: my mind translated the message into the appropriate words according to the drive of the communication. But even a clear-cut formulation in words can come. I remember how after Sehra's death I once appealed to my favourite front-face photo of Sri Aurobindo: "What should I do to get over this sense of a knife turning in my heart in spite of all the peace that is still within me as usual everywhere else?" This photo is not the one that is popular in the Ashram. There the eyes are slightly lowered - in mine they look straight ahead: the vision of some luminous future appears to be in them. When my appeal went to the photo, the answer was immediate in unmistakable words: "Be like me." It was indeed a tall order but the only one really ultimate. And, of course, with the order came the help to follow it as much as I could. The occasion marked a great change in me - an intenser phase of
Page 21
the feeling I always have of Sri Aurobindo's unity with me.
Let me explain what exactly 1 mean by "unity". Generally people speak of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother being in their hearts. I once told the Mother: "When I kneel at the Samadhi I do not have the sense of Sri Aurobindo within me. He seems too big to be held within my small heart. Rather I feel that I am within Sri Aurobindo, a tiny creature nestling in his mighty heart. He holds me one with himself rather than my holding him one with me. I live enfolded by his greatness. What is the right feeling to have? Am I wrong to differ from the general experience?" The Mother answered: "Both the ways are right. It all depends on one's own turn of feeling. But perhaps what you feel corresponds more to the spiritual reality and relationship."
Sri Aurobindo's "Be like me" puts me in mind of two points from the past. A vivid suggestion of how the inner greatness of Sri Aurobindo got expressed in his physical presence went home to me when I heard Purani say to someone: "After having seen Sri Aurobindo I feel no need to see the Himalayas!" And it is precisely apropos of this impression of Purani's that my second point acquires the most striking relevance. For it concerns an early poem of mine which expresses my own aspiration in anticipation, as it were, of Sri Aurobindo's compassionate command to me. Here is the poem:
At the Foot of Kanchenjanga
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
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And mute, from dawn to dawn address
Thoughts white like snow.
You may remark: "To hope to become like Himalayan Sri Aurobindo is one thing. But can one believe that such a hope could ever get fulfilled? Look at the grandeur that is Sri Aurobindo and look at us poor pygmies!" No doubt, he is not only superb: he is also an Avatar - and Avatarhood is not something one can choose to have: it is uniquely ordained. All the same, what the Avatar comes to do is to exemplify the possibilities open to us short of the Avataric role. Let me quote to you the letter Sri Aurobindo wrote to me in April 1935 in reply to my question whether we - "poor pygmies", as you would say - could legitimately aspire to be supra-mentalised:
"I have no intention of achieving the Suprmind for myself only - I am not doing anything for myself as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others. My supramentalisation is only a key for opening the gates of the Supramental to the earth-consciousness; done for its own sake, it would be perfectly futile. But it does not follow either that if or when I become supra-mental, everybody will become supramental. Others can so become who are ready for it, when they are ready for it -provided:
"(1) One does not make a too personal or egoistic affair of it turning it into a Nietzschean or other ambition to be superman.
"(2) One is ready to undergo the conditions and stages needed for the achievement.
"(3) One is sincere and regards it as a part of the seeking of the Divine and consequent culmination of the Divine's Will in one and insists on no more than the fulfilment of that
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Will whatever it may be: psychicisation, spiritualisation or supramentalisation. It should be regarded as the fulfilment of God's working in the world, not as a personal chance or achievement."
The letter contains a potent threefold hint of Sri Aurobindo's Avatar-status - the awareness of a pre-existent conscious plenitude as if everything were already achieved, and the ardour of manifestation heroically ready to undergo the utmost labour as if nothing were achieved anywhere, and the utter selflessness which in spite of no need of one's own seeks to pioneer an impossible-seeming accomplishment in order to make easy for others the path to their perfection through a whole-hearted dedication on their part to serve the Divine Will and nothing else. The letter assures also that what Sri Aurobindo can have is essentially open to all his followers in the terms of their individual make-up.
A general comment I may make that since Sri Aurobindo for some reason of his own did not exemplify the last stage of supramentalisation - the physical stage - we cannot look forward to it in our present lives, but all the marvels on the way to it are within our grasp in the measure of our devotion to the ideal and in accordance with God's vision for our work. From what you write I think you are doing well enough what lies in your power, and that smile of Sri Aurobindo's suggests that he is pleased with you. The detail you mention that, "while smiling, his left-side lip slightly goes up as also his cheek" brings to my mind an occasion when the Mother said to us that people had been saying that after Sri Aurobindo's departure her face was looking more and more like his (minus of course the moustache and beard!) especially when she smiled. As far as I recollect, the smile was understood to be somewhat like what you have indicated.
(16.3.1990)
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Speech after long silence is not unwelcome and is also likely to be both rich and studied, on the watch not to be superfluous or irresponsible. But it is also likely to be abundant and your letter is no exception. You have put a number of questions, a few of them of undoubted importance and one of them rather embarrassing to me, being of a very personal nature and with a flattering suggestion to the little ego that is always ready to pop up.
"Coil" in the expression to which you point on p. 731 of Mother India, November 1989 should hardly puzzle you. Surely you must know, as does Macaulay's famous "every schoolboy", that to "shuffle off this mortal coil" is Shakespearian poetry for the prosaic act of dying. But "mortal coil" does not refer to our perishable body, as most people think. It means "the turmoil of life".In general "coil" as an archaic or extra-literary turn of speech connotes "disturbance, noise" and could stand also for "fuss" in colloquial Elizabethanese. In Sri Aurobindo's early poetry it has an Indian avatar with a trema-sign over the i: "coil". It is the Hindi name for the cuckoo whose Sanskrit appellation is "kokila". In common English the current spelling for this bird is "koel" with the accent on the first syllable which is intrinsically long.
Now for the query which embarrasses me. It raises some other issues too in the course of its formulation. It is so important that I have to face it. To get my answer into focus I would like to put together passages from two different places in your letter. You write:
"You speak of death as a suggestion which need not necessarily be accepted, after already having dropped some hints concerning your own self in this same connection. You hint at some experiences at the age of 85 which are quite in line with what is to be expected of you as the only person to my knowledge of whom the Mother said that he would undergo the Great Transformation in the present body. I don't really know what to think of it, but it's such an extraordinary statement that - no matter what may be our difference of opinion in other fields - you are in this context
Page 25
the most important person remaining in the Ashram if not the most important person anywhere. If, as stated, the Great Transformation will take at least 300 years from the time of the definite installation of the higher consciousness (of which I don't even know whether you have already achieved it), we may expect you to be seen on earth for much longer than we shall have eyes to see. So what 1 wanted to ask you is whether you may not have something more to say on the subject - which at least to me is of supreme interest and importance - than what you have already hinted at....
"Sri Aurobindo, as was indicated to us, could afford to leave because the Mother was there to continue the work. The Mother was in the same position after the Manifestation of February 1956 as she herself stated shortly thereafter in a most interesting and revealing passage quoted somewhere in Champaklal's Treasures. In it she says that now that things are essentially fulfilled it remains to be seen whether and to what extent her own body is needed to complete the work or whether this body can be abandoned and the work be accomplished in other bodies than hers. And here is where, according to none other than the Mother herself, amazingly and incomprehensibly, you come in first and foremost by a long shot. For who could be the others? To Nolini, I believe on his 80th birthday, she spoke of many more years on the way to transformation. Perhaps that was fulfilled by his remaining for another 15 years. To Satprem she stated in the 1962 Agenda that in his meditations she saw him entering into the timeless and spaceless fields, the consciousness of Sat, a fact enabling him with the proper procedure to begin the work of transformation even from that moment. But there is no indication of whether he has succeeded in carrying out that task. His external behaviour to me would seem to point to the contrary. Her statement concerning you was much more clear and sweeping. It does not seem to leave room for any possibility of failure. All eyes should therefore be glued on you, although people don't appear to know or realise it."
Let me assure you that in the references you have cited, I
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did not at all have in mind the subject you have raised. I only mentioned my sense of not getting my life shortened by such rashness as sitting at my typewriter at times up to 3 a.m., and getting up at 6 in the morning as usual and not resting for more than half an hour in the afternoon. I never meant to suggest that this feat pointed to my getting younger and younger on the way to an ultimate immortality due to "the Great Transformation" which the Mother had prophesied in an interview I had been graced with in May 1929 and which Sri Aurobindo confirmed as her prophecy when on 31 January 1934 I sent him my report of the interview. I asked him whether the reporter had not been a self-deluding fool misrepresenting what the Mother had actually said. You want to know my comment on the matter now after all the decades that have gone since those two tremendous occasions.
Although 1 cannot make the lament that these decades have marked an increasing decadence, I must record that side by side with some progress in opening to the Divine in both the inner and the outer life the body itself has not kept pace in every feature. I indeed don't feel less fit in general at 85 than at 25 when the Mother made the grand declaration, but, as I have repeatedly written to friends, my legs have grown worse and worse in the last ten years or so. The lower body has suffered, though without affecting in the least my day-to-day mood which - while lacking the famous "flashing eyes" and very much the equally celebrated "floating hair" -is touched by something of the light and delight Coleridge ascribed to his visionary poet in Kubla Khan:
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the lower body and the rest of me is the result of a defect in my sadhana. While I have opened more and more to the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother within and around and above, I
Page 27
have not been able to experience it below. For bodily transformation it is the Divine crypted in Matter who is to be realised and released in full response to the free Divinity elsewhere. I believe that to get at this crypted Divinity a luminous pressure is required by an incarnate Divinity. You may recall the Mother once telling me: "I hope to cure your polio- affected leg one day. But only the Supramental Power can help . Not even the Overmind can have such an effect on Matter." Years after this, Sri Aurobindo himself got in trouble with his right leg owing to an accident in November 1938. He is said to have remarked: "It is one more problem to tackle." He would have had to work in the very domain where my own difficulty lay, and the descent of the Super-mind into the most outward physical was needed. Twelve years later he chose to leave his body. About twenty years afterwards the Mother began to have trouble with her legs. The last words reported from her had to do with the possibility of her legs becoming useless: "Make me walk, make me walk!" When our Gurus themselves were concerned with the difficulty of setting free the crypted Divine and when they are no longer there in physical forms, how can I hope that my legs will become strong? How long these lower limbs will drag me on is anybody's guess. Possibly much will depend on the way the rest of Amal's body fares under the influence of that part of his consciousness which is the Supreme Mother's child. Let us look forward to a progressive "second childhood" of this sort accompanying his advance towards a tottering, though hopefully not doddering, nonagenarianism.
Here you may well ask: "How about the glorious prophecy of 1929 which singled you out so clearly?" All I can say is that it was the most clear crystallisation, in one particular case, of what was expected in general about several of us in the early phase of Ashram life, which coincided with our own youth. Do you remember Wordsworth's lines about the beginning of the French Revolution which seemed to promise a new age and in which he took some part? -
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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven...
With a perfectionist from Paris as our beloved spiritual Mother and leader we were in the ecstatic beginning of what I may call the French Evolution promising the most novel epoch in history - a stage beyond the human. And the goal aimed at - total supramentalisation - was conceived and seen as waiting for her followers as much as for herself. Nor were such conception and vision confined to the Ashram's initial period though most overtly entertained in those days. Even less than a decade before she left her body she could allay my 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." Some years earlier, when I was in Bombay and reported from there an extremely vivid experience of all of me giving itself up to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother she replied (19.5.1944) that the experience seemed to her "a valid promise" that the realisation would come if I made up my mind to it. In answer to my reference to a "warning" she had given me she explained: "as for what I meant in my last letter it was simply that there were things which might delay your spiritual realisation and might be otherwise dangerous for you. This does not mean that the realisation will not come." (A general statement of the Mother's may be cited from Questions and Answers of 1957 (p. 165): "Sri Aurobindo expected of us to become supermen - I think -I know - that now it is certain that we shall realise what he expects of us. It has become no longer a hope but a certitude... let each one do his best and perhaps not many years will roll by for the first visible results to be apparent to all." What, then, led to her own departure and the uncertainty in which we live today?
Of course this uncertainty relates only to the "Great Transformation": wonders on wonders are possible short of it and all of them are within reach of us: full psychicisation, complete spiritualisation, life in the Overmind Conscious-
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ness touched by the Supermind. Only supramentalisation appears to be beyond us at present. Sri Aurobindo's words in a letter to me in April 1935 - a typical Avataric pronouncement if ever there was one - ring in my ears: "I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only - I am not doing anything for myself, as I have no personal need of anything, neither of salvation (Moksha) nor supramentalisation. If I am seeking after supramentalisation, it is because it is a thing that has to be done for the earth-consciousness and if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others." The last sentence sounds crucial. Here "myself" should be taken to include the Mother. So I would say that if he and she did not do it, we can't either - at the current stage of spiritual history.
' I must clarify two issues at this point. Please note that I have said that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother did not undergo physical transformation. I have not said that they could not. The supramental Avatars come from beyond the cosmic law. There is never a could not for them. They may observe the cosmic law but nothing binds them down. Their own choice and not any necessity stops them. If they appear to fail, it is because apparent failure - with all that preludes it - suits them for a reason we may not be able to fathom.
That is the first issue. The second relates to your reference to Champaklal's Treasures. You quote the Mother as declaring that "bodies other than hers" might accomplish the work if she would abandon her own body. Your implication is that the bodies of people like us, or of those still to be born of our kind, might be the performers of physical supramentalisation. According to me, what she meant was a contrast between her present body and whatever body she might take up for herself in the future. On p. 96 of the book there is no reference to a number of bodies: there is a reference to only one body as an alternative to the body she is inhabiting at the time of speaking, and this alternative appears to be her own next embodiment. Her actual words simply are: "Is it that the mission of this form is ended and that another form is to take
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up the work in its place? I am putting the question to The and ask for an answer - a sign by which I shall know for certain that it is still my work and I must continue in spite of all the contradictions, of all the denials." Over against her existing form, which is meeting with a lot of difficulty and obstruction, she puts another which she would assume in a birth to come. She did not have in view some Nolini or Satprem or, as you imagine, Amal Kiran.
No doubt, the Mother had no egoistic regard for her own body. She was bent on the embodiment of the Supermind by whatever instrumentation. If any of her disciples could do it after her departure or even instead of her while she was with them, she would have no objection. But I do not see the slightest evidence of her actually envisaging an alternative to herself. In 1969 Bulletin, April, p. 89) she says that if her body, in spite of her persistence, did not "hold on", she would be constrained to let the transformation "be for another time". In a later talk {Bulletin, August 1972, p. 81), while referring to the new glorious body in which she had inwardly lived on February 15, 1969 as if it had been the most natural sheath for her, she points to her existing body and exclaims: "Is that going to change? It must change or it has to follow the old ordinary process of undoing itself and remaking itself." I find in no place a clear-cut reference to anybody other than herself continuing her work of physical supramentalisation, whereas the pointer to her own future continuation of it is fairly explicit. I remember also, though at the moment I can't quote chapter and verse, the Mother recording that(she was told by the Lord that hers was the only body which could accomplish the difficult change - the first such experiment in human history.
I leave aside the idea sometimes entertained that the Mother would materialise her "new body" directly and not pursue the line of rebirth- She is said to have expressed in the Agenda a strong dislike for such a line. But the dislike of again being born and growing up and slowly developing may emphasise her wish and eagerness to complete her mission
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in the very life at her disposal. I don't know whether the idea of precipitating a new body after the end of her existing one has been distinctly visualised in the way her rebirth is in the two talks I have mentioned. Even -the possibility of that precipitation must be thought of after considering Sri Aurobindo's announcement through the Mother that he would be the first to manifest in a supramental body built in the supramental way - that is, without the intervention of the common human birth-procedure. It is not easy to think of his return without the Mother being already there to represent the human supramentalised to complement his representation of the supramental humanised. This would imply her rebirth as one of us to pioneer the fulfilment of earthly evolution.
I come back to my main point: the unlikelihood of the Mother's having had in mind the bodies of other people achieving supramentalisation in the wake of her relinquishing the attempt at it. So I cannot help concurring with Nolini that physical transformation, though not cancelled, has been postponed as far as our present age is concerned.
This does not signify that we must quite divert our attention from our bodies and not think of charging them with the superhuman, the divine. We should do our utmost to make them rhyme with our inner concords. But this is done by concentrating first on those concords and letting them overflow as much as possible into our physical cells. To put in the centre of our work something like changing the "genetic code" is to set about in the wrong way. Our "genetic code" need not be neglected, but - as Sri Aurobindo always insisted - our chief task is to unite with the Divine by bringing forth our soul-depths and reaching out to spiritual heights and passing beyond ego, rancour, anger, desire, falsehood, ambition, unrest. Change of consciousness as a consequence of inner union with the Divine is the radiant core of the Aurobindonian life, the central fountain of the Integral Yoga. Unless this change is brought about in intense earnest, the attention given to physical cells will be a side-
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track and prove to be a blind alley. I know that the Mother was concentrating on them during the last years of her earthly sojourn, but with the background of a supreme divine consciousness held within her body and acting upon the cells from its profundity and its altitude and its circum-ambience. Without overlooking the cells, let our primary aim be to catch something of that consciousness.
Now I come to the German woman who proffered the information "that Sri Aurobindo was married away by his family as is the custom in India, but that he didn't really want it and never touched his wife". As you comment, it is as if she were writing about Sri Ramakrishna and his marriage. Sri Aurobindo's situation was different. Nirodbaran once asked him why he had married when his destiny was spiritual. Nirodbaran made the pathetic remark with other cases in mind: "We feel so sad about Buddha's wife, so too about the wife of Confucius." After discussing the matter half jocularly and half seriously Sri Aurobindo concluded: "Do you think that Buddha or Confucius or myself were born with a prevision that they or I would take to the spiritual life? So long as one is in the ordinary consciousness, one lives the ordinary life. When the awakening and the new consciousness come, one leaves it - nothing puzzling in it." Again, there was never any question of his family getting Sri Aurobindo paired off with Mrinalini. In 1900 he himself chose to wed and got many offers and personally selected the daughter of Bhupal Chandra Bose of Calcutta. A photograph of him and his fourteen-year old wife shows quite a poetic and romantic young man in full English dress sitting close to Mrinalini; there seems no aversion to touching her. It is also on record that they went to Nainital on "Honeymoon" for a month. This was in April 1901, No doubt he did not prove to be a good family man. He had a fairly short spell of conventional family life owing to his absorption in political work, and afterwards in spiritual practice. In a letter to his father-in-law he explained: "I am afraid I shall never be good for much in the way of domestic virtues. I have tried, very
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ineffectively, to do some part of my duty as a son, a brother and a husband, but there is something too strong in me which forces me to subordinate everything to it." But marriage was not from the beginning foreign to his life-style any more than it was to the Mother's. Perhaps as representative leaders of the whole of human life's activity to the spiritual goal both he and the Mother had to pass through all phases of it before founding the Integral Yoga.
As regards the French "imbecile" and the English "moron", about which I made some observations in a letter in Mother India I am making unexpected discoveries. I suppose the French locution could have been directly translated by the English one with the same sound and spelling, but, apart from the colloquial meaning, the English word has a bearing worse than "moron"! The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a moron technically as an adult with intelligence equal to that of an average child of 8-12. This is the definition I quoted in my letter. But I read now the same authority's entry on "imbecile": "a person of weak intellect, especially adult with intelligence equal to an average child of about 5." So to be dubbed a moron is quite a compliment in comparison to being called an imbecile. The worst thing it seems, is to be designated an idiot. Technically, "idiot" signifies: "a person so deficient in mind as to be permanently incapable of rational conduct." I guess the most harmless term on the whole and most close to what the Mother intended is "fool" or, if a more lively English rendering is to be made, one may say "silly-billy".
(10.3.1990)
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4
It is curious that I have somehow neglected your birthday on the 12th of March. You have drawn my attention to it more than once but I have acted as if I were unconcerned altogether. I know that birthdays have an importance. According to the Mother, one is more plastic than at other times to the Divine and there is a new chance each year on that occasion to bring one's soul to the front. But there are people who are constantly being re-bom day after day, and for such people the official birthday is not of special significance. To me you are a person who is made "new" more and more in the image of the "true" every twenty-four hours. Your whole life is attuned to the Divine and each sunrise leads on to a finer harmony of the various parts in their turning towards the Infinite and the Eternal. Love of the Supreme leads in a preeminent degree to the state which the poet Tennyson, writing of love between humans at its best, conveys most memorably in those two lines:
Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords
with might -
Smote the chord of self that, trembling, passed in music
out of sight.
Yes, from earliest girlhood you have felt called to the spiritual life. But you have something of an ascetic in your nature and this, coupled with the typical woman in you, has made your physical life too hard-working. All women want to keep their rooms spick and span - a worthy ideal but not to be followed over-rigidly if it taxes one's health. A little dust here and there, a bit of disorder in some comers can't do much harm, provided one's heart remains clean of egoistic desires and one's mind holds first things first - namely, remembrance of the Divine. Further, if one is not physically very smart in arranging things, one should have in mental
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sight the spot where one has dumped one's papers, etc. I remember the Mother once telling us of Sri Aurobindo's habits. Unlike her, he was not a paragon of tidiness. His papers seemed to be piled up or scattered carelessly. But, according to the Mother's report, he had a recollection of where exactly in his dumps he had pushed this or that manuscript. When he wanted any to be brought to him, he would indicate the precise place in his room and the precise heap where it seemed to have got lost. I am much of an Aurobindonian in this respect though after about three months my memory dims and I need to be newly careless and disorderly while keeping track of things in general in my mind.
About my environment I can afford to be easy-going because a devoted friend is there to keep things in good shape. If she were absent and nobody took up at least part of her work my rooms would certainly be cobwebby, even if they might not resemble the state of things Omar Khayyam laments when thinking of the old Persia:
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The court where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,
And Bahrain, that great Hunter — the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep.
Yes, I would be in a sorry plight, but I may muster some energy to prevent the lion and the wild ass from feeling at home in my flat. The lizard is of course welcome. The Mother liked its presence since it serves to keep insects and mosquitoes away. Easygoing though I am, I have not yet come to the grand limit reached by Dilip Kumar Roy who once told me: "If I had to dust my rooms, I would rather commit suicide."
In addition to your spick-and-span complex you have assumed the burden of too much discipline in sadhana. Your spiritual programme seems to be very distinctly charted out. Possibly a slight relaxation now and again in view of your
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health will not come amiss. But habits die hard, and you will be happy - or at least satisfied - only if the pattern in which you have taught yourself to move Godward is upheld. Here too I am quite easygoing. Except for the visit to the Samadhi for an hour and a quarter every afternoon, nothing is solidly set for me. At the Samadhi too I have no fixed mode of spiritual behaviour. I shut my eyes or keep them open, looking at the diverse design of fellow-sadhaks standing or bending at the Samadhi or else I look upward at the bright patches of far blue through the varied intertwining of steady brown branches and tremendous green leaves of the spreading "Service Tree" and experience an intense relief to my small human body's earth-bound existence. I even dare to answer briefly some questions and get occasionally reprimanded for ignoring the notice "Silence" - reprimanded not by expressive signs as it should be, but with words as silence-breaking as my own! Once the notice was even taken off its hook and held under my nose. I must say it didn't smell nice.
Yes, I have no fixities in my life. A visiting Englishman, a researcher, who subjected me to a battery of questions on the spiritual pursuit was surprised on hearing from me that, unlike his other interlocutors, I didn't make it a point to plunge for some time into deep meditation soon after getting up in the morning! I sounded quite frivolous when I said that after washing my face I generally sat at my typewriter and thumped away till bath-time. I explained to him: "In my understanding, meditation is not meant to be a special indrawn state divorced from one's outward active hours. It is a state in which whenever you feel so inclined you draw into a close quiet knot the various threads of your consciousness which, though outwardly oriented, are still to be held together in an easy manner at their starting-points in some happy sense of divine Presence within your heart. Along these threads this sense sends out feelers towards the divine Presence around and above - the Mother's Love enfolding you, Sri Aurobindo's Light uplifting you. The act of typing
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need be no distraction from the soul's aspiration towards the archetype, the supreme model of each part of us, waiting in some depth of eternity, some height of infinity, to manifest in the moments of time, the configurations of space."
I can't say I am anywhere near a hundred-per-cent success at my unplanned sadhana. But my whole trend is towards finding the true secret of such a life. In order to occupy ourselves as the fancy takes us and to be able to occupy our minds in whatever way we want without ceasing to do Yoga, the Yogic centre has to be what Sri Aurobindo calls the psychic being. The psychic being, which in physical terms is felt behind the middle of our chest, is a fountain of spontaneous remembrance of the Divine and the mainspring of an automatic offering of ourselves and our doings to the Supreme With that In-dweller awake, you can read or write or talk or carry on any other job without digression from sadhana, because you will not have to make any effort to concentrate on sadhana. The practice of God's presence will go on by itself just as the heart goes on beating, but now there will be a joy beyond the mere pie de vivre: an ecstasy of expectation of the Eternal Beloved will render your life the prayer which a stanza in Sri Aurobindo's Musa Spiritus f ormulates:
All make tranquil, all make free.
Let my heart-beats measure the footsteps of God
As He comes from His timeless infinity
To build in their rapture His burning abode.
Or else there will be a constant cry as in Sri Aurobindo's Bride of the Fire to Her whom a Savitri-passage calls "Wisdom-Splendour, Mother'of the universe" as well as "Creatrix, the Eternal's artist-bride" - a cry which culminates in that total appeal in the last stanza:
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart, -
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Call of the One!
Stamp there thy radiance, never to part,
O living Sun.
(9.4.1990)
I received your card and read the message inscribed in it. Thank you for your affection for me. There is not only an affinity between us but I have a strange recollection of your bearded face as something familiar. Trying to trace surface-causes I see it as a very attractive blending of my father in his early days and of my favourite Jesuit teacher at school: Father Kaufmann, a Swiss German. Kaufmann so influenced me that I even used to go about at times with a facial characteristic of his - knit eye-brows - as if I were angry! My desire to grow a beard was partly due to him and my father and partly to Bernard Shaw. Shaw's beard had become symbolic of his attitude to the follies of his time - an attitude which remained throughout his life so that an admirer of his, Gerald Bullett, could say: "The only difference between Shaw young and Shaw old is that his beard which was once red with anger is now white with rage!"
When I go behind surface-causes I feel from the way my own development has taken place in this life that 1 must have had a twofold contact with you in past lives. In the present life, at the beginning of my college-career, I was very much affected by Christianity. Even now I am tremendously interested in the earliest original form of this religion, the form which was prevalent in the time of Jesus himself as evinced from our earliest documents, the epistles of Paul who was acquainted with Peter and with "the Lord's brother", James. One of my eighteen still unpublished books is on this form, directly or indirectly, waiting like the others for the finance to bring it into the light of day. What is most significant is that the Mother, on seeing my photos after the first year and a half of my stay in the Ashram when I had grown a beard and worn my hair a little long, exclaimed: "You look like an early
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Christian, one of those who used to go and live in the desert." I knew of those monks: they had fled the cities and made their home in the Thebaid, thinking the devil was among the crowds of men insteadof within themselves. Perhaps you too were in that early ascetic group. Or else we may have been in some monastery later on, following especially a cult of the Virgin Mary. I wonder if there was any monastery in the places of Christian Europe with which I feel most familiar without ever seeing them in the present life: the Rhineland and, in the poet Longfellow's words, "the ancient town of Bruges, the quaint old Flemish city".
The second aspect of my touch of depth-on-depth with you emerges from the quick transition I made from my Christ-coloured student-days to the period of profound fascination by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda who served as a passage to the still wider call of Sri Aurobindo. This call with its "integral" earth-accepting Yoga conjured up as its background the age of the Rigveda when first what he has termed "Supermind, Truth-Consciousness, Gnosis, Vijnana, Mahas" was visioned and aspired after under the Mantric name of Satyam, Ritam, Brihat - "The True, the Right, the Vast". You and I may have been fellow-brahmacharis, with newly sprouting fluff on our chins, sitting at the feet of some grand old bearded Rishi chanting his superb experiences which, if couched in Sri Aurobindo's language, would reach our ears thus:
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
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.
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So it is both by the Way of the Cross and by the Path which the Ancients of India laid out for the Gods to descend and for men to ascend that your shapely beard bristles so familiarly, so intimately to the imagination of my soul.
Now to another matter than ourselves. If your relationship with the monks is improving, how exactly do you read the improvement? Have they come to understand the ideals that you hold? It will be interesting also to know how they look at the stupendous changes in Russia and Eastern Europe? Do these changes strike them merely as the failure of materialism - a prelude to conventional Christianity returning to power? I wonder whether they can grasp what I was trying to say in my last letter to you which has been published in the April Mother India. Russia is indeed a country religious at heart, but, as far as I can see, the modern enlightened mind among its people is likely to turn towards a non-sectarian spiritual view such as their Indological studies have brought before them - the wide Vedantic vision emphasising the Divine within the world, the Divine manifesting in the human and, because of the secret Divine everywhere, the earth's developing destiny towards universality and oneness.
(11.4.1990)
I am always glad to hear from you but feel sad that all the news is not happy. There are two components here: one is the actual physical weakness, trivial thoughts, lack of normal sleep - the other is the worry about these things. Take them for brute facts without thinking: "How long will they last? Will they be there for ever? What other troubles will come in their wake?" When you write "My equipoise is gone", you touch the real mishap. But this is not an irrevocable affair. Call for Sri Aurobindo's peace which is invisibly there all the time above you and around you and deep within you. Once he has accepted you as his own, he never leaves you. The same with the Mother's sweet grace. She can never be far
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and both she and the Lord hold you always in their arms. Try to be conscious of this fact and don't allow your heart to be vexed, your mind to be clouded, no matter how many outward "ills" (as Hamlet would say) "the flesh is heir to." The Divine Presence has been established in your life: you have only to grow aware of it all the time. Once you realise that it is ever accompanying you, all those "ills" will be held securely in an inner calm, confined within their proper limits - that is, the sheer physical sense of them and not permitted to overflow into the rest of your psychology. I am telling you all this not out of a book of wisdom; I am reading out what is written on the pages of my own life. So many bodily inconveniences and even aches are part of my days - and nights - and yet my eyes are filled with the glorious memory of Sri Aurobindo's serene greatness and the Mother's depth of love, and with this memory their actual beings are present with me from hour to hour and a far-away smile plays about my lips - far-away because I am inwardly taken to a dreamful distance from those inconveniences and aches. From that distance they look small, insignificant. The same can happen to your troubles, for surely you are as much a child as I am of His imperturbable immensity and of Her intensity of bliss. Remember also that I invoke their help for you every afternoon at the Samadhi and seek to make you remember the help which is unfailingly with you.
Why do you say the death of Suddhananda Bharati, renamed Radhananda by Sri Aurobindo when he entered the Ashram where he stayed for nearly 22 years, was not announced in any paper but mentioned only on radio? I read of it in the Indian Express and there was even a picture of him. I knew him quite well. He had a frank, friendly and cheerful disposition. He told me that he used to believe he was the "Mahapurusha" ("Great Being") of the age but when he saw Sri Aurobindo he realised his mistake. He was a genuine Yogi with a versatile sadhana, including work on the Kundalini, but he was eccentric in his ways and those ways were often more laughable than impressive. An entry on him
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{p. 44) in a recent publication - Glossary and Index of Proper Names in Sri Aurobindo's Writings, compiled with wide and generally brilliant research over years by Gopal Dass Gupta of the Ashram Archives - errs in my opinion by saying about Radhananda that "his austere looks and leonine movements make an unforgettable impression on the visitor". Evidently Gopal Dass has got this bit from some books by an admirer, a "lioniser", of Radhananda's. Perhaps the impression was due to the fact that for a long time when his admirers came to meet him he would not come out of his room in the Ashram courtyard but talked with them in a few words through his window which may have had bars. I am sure he did not growl or roar at them but his remaining confined to his room and his inaccessibleness except across that aperture made them feel he was like a lion in a self-chosen austere cage. I don't think anyone in the Ashram would have made the remark quoted by Gopal Dass who did not have the chance to meet Radhananda. It is true, as the entry avers, that Radhananda wrote profusely. But some of his expressions were rather odd. I recall from one of his most popular books - a compendium of Yoga - things like "Agitate not, vegetate not, only cogitate" and "the Supermind is the electric lift to the Supreme." Once a talk about him and this book took place in the Prosperity Room where some of us had the luck to sit in a semi-circle in front of the Mother before the evening's Soup Distribution. The Mother was told that this book, from which I had quoted to her, had been buried in the Washington Vault among other writings and objects for people some centuries hence to open and see what our time was interested in and productive of. The Mother smiled and said: "The Americans like somewhat fantastic things." But I may add that she is reported to have encouraged Radhananda when he wrote poems in French every day during one period.
In connection with the compendium of Yoga she spoke in general of writers who are prolific and those who are economical. The former do not always care to produce
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perfect pieces while the latter are bent on perfection. As the highest examples of the two categories she mentioned Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert.
Radhananda was multilingual and wrote English poems no less than French and Tamil ones. But a certain composition in English attributed to him in Champaklal's Treasures and reproduced with Sri Aurobindo's extremely instructive corrections was not his at all. It was a very early attempt of mine after'I joined the Ashram.
Radhananda had the habit of coming late to the general meditation, inwardly absorbed and with his eyes half shut, and taking his way to his usual seat after putting one foot in the lap of whoever sat on the fringe of the group! Mridu, the usually vociferous explosive, often happened to be in that place. You can imagine her indignant state. But she had to keep mum as meditation was going on. Whatever his idiosyncrasies, the Mother once gave Radhananda the compliment that he was the only person in the Ashram capable of real Tapasya (severe self-discipline) and she on one occasion recounted the extraordinary concentrated manner in which he comported himself after a heavy fall on the terrace of the house where he had been put up before his transfer to the Ashram compound. Without that manner the fall might have had serious consequences to the internal organs. Yes, he had unusual modes of acting and behaving, both admirable and strange. One peculiarity of his was that after the Mother had given flowers at pranam he thought of getting the utmost benefit of the spiritual power put into them by simply eating them up!
Now to another topic. You find it difficult to understand why, as related in "Dyuman - the Luminous One", dyuman didn't look at Sri Aurobindo while fixing up something in his room. I may try to lessen your difficulty by relating one incident. After the Soup Distribution I used to go ahead and wait in the courtyard of the main Ashram building for the Mother to pass on her way to the staircase leading upstairs. Once I saw the silhouette of Sri Aurobindo behind the open shutters on the first floor. I felt very happy. When I told the
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Mother of it afterwards, she said: "It is better not to look at him since he does not want it." Obviously his retirement in November 1926 implied this along with other exclusions. The work he was doing on his own body during the years of his withdrawal was not to be interfered with by anyone looking at it. All vibrations, however subtle, touching it were to be avoided. We know that his withdrawal did not mean cutting off all relationship with us or an aversion from world-affairs. He was in close daily contact with his disciples through letters - I used to receive two a day sometimes - and he kept himself informed of what was going on in the world. It was from physical relationship that he had drawn back: his body was being worked upon by the Supramental Force and it needed to be aloof as much as possible from even the intrusion of eyes with their curiosity and their claims.
Apropos of your experience of anaesthesia by ether as well as pentothal sodium you have asked me what operation under ether I have referred to in my letter. When I was two and a half years old I suffered an attack of infantile paralysis, whose pet name nowadays is polio. The heel of my left foot was pulled up so much that I had to walk with my hand on my left knee in order to press the heel down to floor-level. The knee-muscles were also affected: I could not lift up the lower part of my leg with their help. My father realised - all the more acutely because he was a doctor - that by walking bent all the time I would develop permanent spinal curvature. He was resolved to save me from it and let me have a fair deal in life. First he tried out the two treatments available in Bombay - massage and electric shocks. He realised they were inadequate and as nothing else was possible he took me, along with my mother, to London when I was almost six years old - which means the middle of 1910. In London he and I went from clinic to clinic in the famous Harley Street. He asked each surgeon his technique. Dr. Tubby's struck papa as the best. All the others had offered to do the work free, papa being himself a doctor. Tubby was greedy and demanded a big fee. But papa accepted him. There were two operations under anaesthesia with ether. They made me a
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straight fellow and in course of time I could indulge as I liked in that passion of mine: Horse-riding - though with special manipulation of the stirrup-straps. In Pondicherry I could go cycling every day - until quite a late period - the early part of my second "home-coming" in 1954. I wasn't so handicapped as now - or if I may perpetrate a horrible pun, "leggi-capped" - until about ten years back - more acutely from 1985 or so. I think my outer life would have been greatly impoverished without knowing by intimate experience the glory of galloping horses. When the Mother told me that she hoped to cure my bad leg one day with the Supramental Power, my first thought was: "O I shall be able to have a grand white horse between my legs without any of the old abnormal arrangements to keep my grip and balance!" Later, when I studied Sri Aurobindo's Secret of the Veda I realised that my physical-seeming aspiration reflected the Vedic vision of the white horse named Dadhikravan which was the leader of the human march upwards - the steed which was said to gallop always towards the dawn, that symbol of the spiritual awakening. Then the secret reading of Savitri, which Sri Aurobindo graced me with, by privately sending me every morning a passage from the on-going composition of the epic, brought me the Yoga of Savitri's father Aswapati -literally, "the Lord of the Horse". When I asked Sri Aurobindo whether this horse was Dadhikravan, he answered "Yes." My sense of affinity with that name became all the more vivid when I found that the white horse represented the purified life-energy. Much of my Yogic effort had been concerned with the rebellious vital force in me. Both the calm-moving mind and the pure-passioned soul had to be put at play in order to make the unruly varicoloured courser of that force learn to reflect the hue and harmony of the spiritual world. All my effort was now bent on turning into a living reality that line in a poem of AE's:
White for Thy Whiteness all desires burn....
(7.4.1990)
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5
You were a bit on the late side for me to send anything for Singapore's celebration of August 15. The next best thing that has happened is that I am writing this letter on the August 15 of Pondicherry. As I was meditating, my mind went back to my first August 15 here. Between February 21, 1928, the Mother's birthday, which marked my first darshan of Sri Aurobindo, and his own birthday-celebration which at that time was the next since there was no April 24 in the interval, a great deal had happened. At the first darshan I had watched Sri Aurobindo's outer appearance closely - his eyes, nose, moustache, beard, hair - and found him impressive enough to be accepted as my Guru! When a day later I met the Mother and asked her whether Sri Aurobindo had said anything about me, she reported: "Yes, he said that you had a good face." Quite a tit for tat! But before the next darshan my whole being had opened up, there had been moments of unbearable inner ecstasy and a general effluence of the deep heart had become a part of my daily life. I had grown a beard and my hair had been worn a little long. As the Mother had noted, I had the face of an early Christian of the Desert. When I knelt at Sri Aurobindo's feet he blessed me with both his hands. Before kneeling, I had looked at his face - quite differently from the first time - and he had kept gently nodding. Later in the morning I had the experience of a tremendous bar as of luminous steel entering my head from above and making me dizzy. The same afternoon, along with a number of fellow-sadhaks, 1 met the Mother. She took me into the darshan room from the outer hall, closed the door, sat down on a small stool while I knelt a second time in the day at her feet. She blessed me and said with an entrancing smile: "Sri Aurobindo was very pleased with you. He said that there had been a great change." I was moved beyond measure.
I think it was after this darshan I started writing poetry in
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the new vein - from the in-world or the over-world. Of course, all genuine poetic stuff hails from these domains, but it is not always couched in the very tongue of them - the fire-tongue that has tasted paradise: it is translated into the imaginative language of the reflective mind or of the passionate life-force. There is a whole bunch of poems by me of the pre-Pondicheny time which belongs to this category -intense in thought and with a sensuousness passing often into artistic sensuality edged with a topsyturvy idealism. Most of them are unpublishable now when people are on the look-out for a halo round my head! But perhaps two or three may pass muster and serve as samples of my juvenile furor poeticus. Towards the end of the period a semi-mystical afflatus came into play, prophetic in a vague manner of my future poetry. Two or three products of it may be added to the other kind - after both groups have been touched up here and there on their technical side.
The "Collected Poems of K.D. Sethna", to which you look forward, is still a far cry. I seem to have imbibed something of the general South-Indian motto which may be said to have been anticipated by Shakespeare in its suggestion of a satisfied slow-goingness and a happy postponing tendency, though his line in its proper context has hardly the same mood. Detached from Macbeth's mouth, it is most apt with its emphatic
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
Benjamin Franklin with his adage - "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" - would have been furious; but perhaps our mood is tinged with the Browning-ian sense of a hidden eternity in our depths:
...What's time? leave 'now' for dogs and apes!
Man has forever.
The theme of a hidden eternity is a good one to close with
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on a day of such profound significance as August 15.1
(15.8.1987)
In the lines from Savitri (Centenary Ed., p. 537) you want me to clarify -
God must be bom on earth and be as man
That man being human may grow even as God -
the second line's "even as God" is equal to "even as God is" and not to your second alternative: "even as God grows." But with "grow" before these words what we are told is: "become like God." In the two preceding lines —
If one of theirs they see scale heaven's peaks,
Men then can hope to learn that titan climb -
the sense seems to me to be simply the realisation of a superhuman or divine consciousness with whatever change it is bound to make in human nature. The specific idea of "transformation" such as Sri Aurobindo has put forth -namely, the permanent divinising of all our parts, ultimately even the body - is not directly there.
You have also asked whether the ascension of the heights has to be done only by "evolutionary avatars like Sri Aurobindo" or also by "accomplished avatars like Sri Krishna". No doubt, there is a distinction between the two types, but fundamentally every avatar has to do some ascension. If the Krishna, son of Devaki, who is mentioned in the Chhandogya Upanishad is the same as the Avatar Krishna of the later traditions, we see that he needed Rishi Ghora's illumined touch-to realise his own divinity to the full. An ascension was made, however rapidly or even
1. The projected book referred to in this letter is now at last published, (A.K., 1994)
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instantaneously. The Upanishad's Krishna was not born with the full divine consciousness: he was not, strictly speaking, "an accomplished avatar". Apart from the picture presented in Vaishnava legends, I don't think any avatar can be "accomplished" in the full sense. The veil of human birth has to be rent at some time or other, in one way or another.
The term "evolutionary avatar" has to be properly understood. It does not mean that avatarhood is achieved as something one was not born with. None can ever become an avatar. Avatarhood is preordained and is a state from birth. If we consider Sri Aurobindo an avatar, he was as much a born avatar as Sri Krishna. He did not evolve into an avatar. The born avatarhood gradually manifested in him in a particular way attuned to the intended harmony of human and divine to be played out in his life. This playing out is the sense of the epithet "evolutionary" we apply to his avatarhood. Further, being "evolutionary" does not stop with scaling "heaven's peaks", nor does living as "one of theirs" confine itself to sharing the common consciousness of men. The evolutionary avatar goes through the entire gamut of human experience. Some lines before those already quoted emphasise this:
The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.
He who would save the world must share its pain.
If he knows not grief, how shall he find grief's cure?
Then we have the stanza from "A God's Labour", which Sri Aurobindo cited to Dilip in a letter before the poem was published:
He who would bring the heavens here
Must descend himself into clay
And the burden of earthly nature bear
And tread the dolorous way.
In this stanza we have a hint which goes beyond a pointing to "heaven's peaks". It points to the work of bringing "the
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heavens here". The phrase may be said to summarise the essence of Sri Aurobindo's avataric labour. It connotes much more than realising God, much more even than establishing a spiritual sangha, a communion of saints. It implies the transformation of human stuff into divine substance - the counterpart to the ascent to the Supermind: the Supermind's descent and the permanent change of earthly existence into a divine life. This counterpart holds the true significance of the epithet "evolutionary". A new species evolving from the human just as the human has evolved from the animal: such is the ultimate sense of the avatar's being "evolutionary". By his arduous manifold sadhana he exemplifies the supreme step of a process of Nature, which has, of course, always Supernature behind it. Sri Aurobindo is an evolutionary avatar in a spiritually scientific sense.
In the Age of Science - the post-Darwinian age, strictly speaking - the so-called "accomplished avatar" would be an anachronism. And though it may surprise you, the "evolutionary avatar" is missioned to do much more than simply bring down superhuman powers to establish a divine life by altering the human state, not only in consciousness but also in material terms. For, this alteration may be possible by imposing on embodied existence an all-pervading godlike state: what in Indian nomenclature we would call a divinisa-tion by a miraculous siddhi, a supernatural power of the highest kind. But this would not be truly evolutionary. Earth would be colonised by divinity: it would not be divine by native means. The Aurobindonian evolution implies that at the base of matter, in the very heart of the lnconscient, the Supermind lies "involved". This involved Supermind has to evolve by its own push upward meeting the downward pressure of the free Supemind. When this co-operation between the concealed Truth-Light below and the unhampered Truth-Light above is complete, earth-life will be by its own right, as it were, godlike. And a total security will be there. Colonisation from above may come to an end: there can be no inherent security and hence no intrinsic perma-
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nence under it. Genuine evolution takes place only if divinisation is accomplished not by an imposed unearthly power, siddhi, but by the earth's own divine dharma, natural law of being, emerging into action. To evoke this dharma would be yogically consonant with the Zeitgeist today. Sri Aurobindo is an "evolutionary avatar" exercising a Super-science which will bear total fruit one day from the supramental seed he has sown in a clay occultly in love with it and ready to make it germinate by means of the Eternal hidden in the hours
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone.
P.S. Thank you for wishing me to live long. I may do so -at least in order to write long letters!
(16.5.1990)
I appreciate the first point you make apropos of my letter of 16.5.1990: "You have used at the end the figure of the supramental seed sown by Sri Aurobindo. Of course this figure has its sense, but it appears to me that 'Godhead pent in the mire and the stone' is more properly the seed helped in its germination by the power brought down by Sri Aurobindo."
I grant that you are more accurate, for the "pent Godhead" is itself earlier hinted at in the poem "The Life Heavens" as
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven.
So I should alter my nomenclature. What Sri Aurobindo brought down should be likened to the sun and rain which would make the buried seed of the involved Supermind germinate. Thank you for the correction.
You also write: "The distinction between the two types of avatars has not been clarified sufficiently. Does it merely consist in the thickness of the veil of birth and the time taken
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to rend it? Sri Aurobindo says about the Mother that she is divine because she had the awareness of her divinity from her childhood. Against this there is the scaling of heaven's peaks, which implies arduous labour."
It is true that the Mother was aware of her divinity in a way in which Sri Aurobindo was not. But even she had to progress and grow deeper, wider, higher and become full at a stage of her life far enough from the time of her childhood. Her more conscious sense of being divine did not preclude "a God's labour" at a later period, an arduous scaling of heaven's peaks.
There is also the evolutionary avatar's aspect of undergoing all sorts of human difficulties. Here too the Mother is on a par with Sri Aurobindo - she even goes one better! Sri Aurobindo2 writes to a disciple: "We have had sufferings and struggles to which yours is a mere child's play...." Again:3 "As for the Mother and myself, we have had to try all ways, follow all methods, to surmount mountains of difficulties, a far heavier burden to bear than you or anybody else in the Ashram or outside, far more difficult conditions, battles to fight, wounds to endure... hostile masses to conquer - a work such as, I am certain, none else had to do before us. For the leader of the way in a work like ours has not only to bring down or represent and embody the Divine, but to represent too the ascending element in humanity to the full and experience, not in mere play or Lila but in grim earnest, all the obstruction, difficulty, opposition, baffled, hampered and only slowly victorious labour which are possible on the path." Finally, about difficulty and suffering and danger: "I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share.... It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden."
I hope that now you do not find the Mother standing in any manner at odds with Sri Aurobindo in the matter of
2.Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1953), p. 368.
3.Ibid., pp. 369-70.
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evolutionary avatarhood, and that my distinction between the two types of avatars has been clarified to your satisfaction.
(26.5.1990)
The pleasure of our meeting was mutual. I found you very open-minded and good-natured - the right condition to profit by a first visit to the Ashram. Here is a new life being experimented with and a new life demands not only a plastic mind but also a nature ready to take things with good grace. For, surprises both pleasant and unpleasant are bound to be in wait for one. You seem to have taken everything in your stride and are in love with what you have seen and experienced in the Ashram. A second visit is certain - and, of course, this means giving me the pleasure once again to meet you.
You have presented a rather strange but, I think, not quite unnatural situation:
"I have been reading Savitri daily, and have nearly finished it. I find that I experience very strong emotions these days, in the sense that I react very strongly to everything. I am not a volatile person at all, but these days the smallest thing evokes an emotion that doesn't seem to have a bearing on my personal
Reading Savitri, with a serious absorption in doing it, is bound to affect one deeply, for this poem is not just a literary creation. In fact no true poetry is just that. But most poetry comes from depths behind the usual psychological levels. Savitri comes from sources beyond those depths and carries the power to reconstitute one's being in the secret light of a Reality mostly unknown to our normal consciousness or
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even to our rare moments of an enlightening inwardness. But it throws a bridge between that Reality and the world we know - our inner world as well as our outer one. Else it would not be able to remould us. It is not a bewildering novelty like the products of Dadaism or Surrealism or even some less sensational attempts of the modem mind to strike novel attitudes in art. Savitri takes the traditional forms of image and word and rhythm and infuses into them a creative light and delight which may best be characterised in some lines from the poem itself about a class of Rishis among those the heroine of the poem met during her quest for a fit mate for her life:
Intuitive knowledge leaping into speech,
Seized, vibrant, kindling with the inspired word,
Hearing the subtle voice that clothes the heavens.
Carrying the splendour that has lit the suns,
They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great
deeps.4
When poetry such as the last line here summarises with a most living power, poetry in which mighty ranges of a superhuman consciousness are active, enters one's life, a great change in one's being is to be expected. At times a profound peace overwhelms one: at other times one begins to see new meanings in the life to which one has been accustomed: at still other times one's ordinary control on habitual movements may get suspended and one may not be at once able to act from the strange reaches to which one has been suddenly opened up. This last result would be rather exceptional, but it would correspond to the experience some
4, Line 2 in this passage has been added from Sri Aurobindo's MS which was under study by some of us for the projected "Critical Edition" of Savitri. The new edition is now called "Revised" instead of "Critical" as the latter technical term was misunderstood by many.
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people have when they first plunge into Yoga in the Ashram: the manner in which they were wont to act from the usual rational mind is taken away and to their own astonishment they find themselves queerly reacting to things and persons -mostly out of character. Gradually a new light of guidance emerges. If the action of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness and of the Mother's brings about on occasion such a result, I don't see why a massive epic in which Sri Aurobindo's highest realisations have been given revelatory expression should not have it in rare cases. What you report shows a conjunction too close to be accidental. The extreme sensitivity with which you received the influx and impact of the unknown powers articulated in the poem have taken away the old rhythm of responses to the everyday world and a new pattern of inner and outer answers has not yet set in.
Your phrase - "all emotions are very intense" - hits off accurately the new state in which you seem to lose your old bearings. Especially people who are very particular about practical details can be affected thus. Don't be frightened at this change. The fact that you are perfectly aware of it and want to understand it and get over it is a sign that you will soon be on the way to experiencing, in place of the negative side of the psychological revolution, the positive side which will produce the genuine life-counterpart of the fresh future that Savitri embodies in the sphere of poetry:
deeps.
My advice is that you should start a second reading. Sit in silence for a little while to put yourself, however distantly, in rapport with what the Goddess of Inspiration did in the process of creating Savitri. From the poem itself we can gather the details of her work:
In darkness' core she dug out wells of light,
On the undiscovered depths imposed a form,
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Lent a vibrant cry to the unuttered vasts.
And through great shoreless, voiceless, starless breadths
Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought
Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable.
Then begin to read the poem audibly - let a soft voice feed the ear with it while the eye traces the pentameters on the page. Thus both the "revealing thought" and the "vibrant cry" of the Aurobindonian vita nuova will best be helped to go home to the budding aspirant for it that you are. All that has become abnormally "intense" will take its true shape when the "immense" that is coupled with the "intense" in Savitri enfolds you like a Divine Mother.
(17.5.1990)
There is no question of my misunderstanding or misjudging you. What you have written about the ridiculousness of "the well-meaning attempt of many to present the Ashram as a garden of spiritual delights and miracles" is correct. Not that the attempt has no truth at all behind it, but such propaganda does smack, as you say, "of the banalities American advertising agents go in for." I am glad you realise that the Ashram life is inwardly a battlefield. I for one never induce anybody to take up Sri Aurobindo's Yoga as an escape from the trials of the ordinary life. Only if there is an intense call for it would I encourage them and then too after giving a balanced picture of how this Yoga is all the harder because it is practised as if under the conditions of that life. The conditions are such that we seem to be leading this life but without its inner facilities. We live constantly among people and work with them and are bound to have relationships with them and yet the-whole attitude to social living is worlds apart from the one which would be natural in a similar context. Here is a life of loneliness in the midst of company, restraint in the thick of opportunities, peace in the heart of traffic, consecration to an invisible Presence in a
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milieu of crowding tangibilities, self-giving to a great Another while pursuing one's own individual and apparently self-centred occupations, an unremitting search of one who ever draws us to exceed ourselves - like the "Spirit of Colour" in a Meredith-poem -
Because His touch is infinite and lends
A yonder to all ends.
I am glad to find you saying: "If and when I do find my way permanently to Pondicherry, it will not be because I am assured of a comfortably lazy retirement in a balmy Carrib-bean beach resort but because I have to begin a new and probably more intense phase of my sadhana." Genuine sadhana is never easy and, when terms are set which are the very opposite of the conventional and traditional ones, extra courage is required, unless the so-called seeker is what a friend of mine used to call "Swami Bogusananda", one who has somehow got in and is only after external conveniences while pretending to be yogic. It is not for nothing that the Mother has said: "Victory is to the most enduring."
Talking of Swamis, I remember a half serious half ironic incident. An ochre-robed visitor earnestly desired to join the Ashram. He had undergone strict Sannyasi discipline, had won severe control over his senses, passed through plenty of bodily discomforts, renounced those famous temptations: kamini-kanchan, which we may modernise as "glamour-girl and gold." What better qualifications for entering an Ashram of Integral Yoga? Sri Aurobindo did not doubt his achievements, but he foresaw all the difficulties he would meet with in living with men and women who went about their businesses like ordinary people, made no outer gestures of renunciation, wore normal clothes, had decently furnished quarters, imposed no fasts or even unusual restrictions in food upon themselves. Hence, very quietly he advised this old-world ascetic to go to his native village and live there like an ordinary human being and meet the common demands of
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life for some time. What was meant is that those who have shirked the difficulties of the world would not be able to cope with the paradoxical situation of the Ashram: the seemingly normal tenor of living and the utter inner self-dedication to the Divine, the complex preparation of a sustained divine earth-life under the aspect of humanity's day-to-day existence.
No doubt, there is the discovery here of a marvellous Innermost who in Rigvedic-Upanishadic language would be called the Immortal in the mortal, the Fire that is without smoke, the Eater of an eternal honey. If we hold that here too are in some form "the tears of things" that haunt the human heart, we must also realise that here in addition is (a la Amal)
The longing of ecstatic tears
From infinite to infinite.
Supporting the strenuous experiment of a life which is to all appearances like any other on earth and yet strives to be free from its usual shortcomings and deviations, we have had the all-calming gaze of Sri Aurobindo and the all-delighting smile of the Mother, and their presences are still with us not only in their uplifting consciousness-infused photographs but also as luminous guides acting at once from within, around, above.Even those who have never met them physically are soon made aware of His Light of Truth pointing them onward and upward, Her warmth of love about which we can say with a slight alteration of the tense in those lines of Savitri:
A deep of compassion, a hushed sanctuary,
Her inward help unbars a gate in heaven.
To use an image from the Taittiriya Upanishad: if their subtle ether were not all about us, who could breathe here for a single moment? But though the celestial ether is there, the air
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is yet terrestrial and the non-sannyasi acceptance of drawing one's breath in pain in this harsh world like some Horatio in the process of gaining a halo is always a fact.
Since you know very well both the "exultations" and the "agonies" in store for you, you are most welcome to join us in our unprecedented "adventure of the apocalypse".
(18.5.1990)
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6
You unpredictable wonderful little girl of fifty odd years, what is all this sudden lamentation and shedding of tears and self-doubting? The Divine Mother is always with you and has accepted you and given you not only good relatives and friends, dear and near ones, but also an elder soul-brother out of the blue who though physically far is ever close to you inwardly and never forgets you even when he delays writing letters. You must hold your soul in peace. We are devotees of Sri Aurobindo who said that his Yoga is founded in equanimity, a wide solid calm, which can sustain all the extraordinary experiences which he can give to his children. If there is no tranquil base, marvellous experiences may come but won't remain as part of one's being. If the foundation keeps shaking, how can a superstructure be established? "Towers may soar up but they Will topple if the ground is not steady. And there is a further reason for serenity. Let me come to it by way of a voice of wisdom from the past
.
Dante wrote in Italian one of the most inspired lines in all poetry, the English of which would simply be: "In His Will is our peace." It means that our hearts can rest only by putting themselves in tune with whatever God wills for us. To accept inevitable circumstances, however hard they may seem - to carry on necessary work no matter how difficult or inconge-nial - to take with quiet gladness whatever lot appears to be ours as though divinely fated - to feel God's hand in all that is given us by the world's common or uncommon movement through time: such is the message of Dante's mahavakya, his great revelatory word. But perhaps something more may be added to complete the visionary drive behind his utterance.
If "in His Will is our peace", we may also consider the other side of the human-divine relationship, the traffic of truth between the Supreme Spirit and the aspiring soul, and deliver the message: "In our peace is His Will." This would
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mean three things. First, a natural state of peace in us would be the sign that God's Will is working in us. Secondly, with peace settled in our heart and mind we shall best know what God wills us to do. It is in the midst of an inner serenity that the urges from on high to right action will most easily arrive. Thirdly, the proof that right action has been done is that the after-glow of an action is peace within us.
At this point you are likely to ask: "How am I to get hold of peace? Will there be peace if I just say, 'Let there be peace'?" To the second question I have to answer both "No" and "Yes". On asserting peace in yourself you won't at once become peaceful. Perhaps the exact opposite would result -so paradoxical is our nature. But a persistent command -with a patient force in it - is bound to bring about, sooner or later, a subsidence of jarring and warring elements.And in this command we must have the sense of God's peace being called into us. Such a sense would imply that already a marvellous eternal peace exists and we do not have to manufacture it. What we have to do is to imagine it intensely and exert our will to draw it near: a prayerful power has to be exerted. A situation of this kind suggests another permutation and combination of the Dantesque mantra. It may run: "In our will is His peace." By means of a prayerful power, a strongly willed supplication aided by a constant resolve to practise detachment which would save us from sudden acute reactions of our nerves to the impact of events, we shall get closer and closer to the condition in which Sri Aurobindo pictures Savitri's father Aswapati in those lines which I have often quoted to my friends:
A poised serenity of tranquil strength,
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest
Faced all experience with unaltered peace.
I hope you don't feel upset by this long endless-seeming discourse on not getting upset. It may remind you of what was said of Carlyle: "In 28 volumes of manifold eloquence he
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preached the virtue of silence." But possibly Carlyle was not as absurd as people might make him out. Silence is so rare a virtue that people may not realise the value and the need of it unless a gifted orator dins them into their ears. Again, if Carlyle had the capacity of silence in his own self, his words would have the capacity to evoke the sense of it in other people's minds. And surely Carlyle did know how to keep silent. There is the famous story of his visits to the poet Tennyson. The two friends would often sit at opposite ends by the fireplace, puffing at their pipes. After a couple of hours of absorption in their own thoughts, without the exchange of a single word, they would get up to part. Carlyle would say to Tennyson: "What a fine evening we have had!" One may wonder what was going on in them- during those two hours of keeping mum. A hint lies in Carlyle's general comment on Tennyson on one occasion: "He is a great fellow given to deep silences spent in cosmicising the chaos within him."
To cosmicise the inner chaos may be regarded by us as the true object of our Yoga. The process would be not only to bring the various parts of our being - often in conflict with one another - into a general harmony. The process would also be to introduce into our being a principle wider than the individual self. Something of the universal, the cosmic, has to come into play, taking us out of our limited ego. In this way something more than a concord within us would be achieved. There would be a happy attunement of ourselves with the world around us - both human creatures and the vast realm of Nature. A mighty Omnipresence would be felt, giving us the power to create peace wherever we go by a touch of the One God who is in the depths of all. But at the same time that an immense reconciling Oneness is evoked there is no loss of the -multiplicity held in the unity. An intimate concourse of persons would be a recurring note. While the single Spirit pervading all would be the basis, the rich element of varying personality would play infinitely upon it. For in the cosmicising act we bring into our ordinary
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nature two secret agents: the Self of selves on the one hand and the inmost individual soul who is a sweetness flowing out to fellow souls and a light which reveals them as brothers and sisters, inseparable children of the same Divine Parents who complete each other:
Calm husband, master of all life -
Radiant incalculable wife.
The Self of selves is the cosmos's truth of underlying and overarching eternity. The individual soul is the truth of the universe's endless time, the thread running through the ages, on which birth after birth is hung.
That's enough of Yogic philosophy and poetry for the present!
(29.4.1990)
Your two letters refer to some very important matters. First, the inner darshan of the Divine Mother on 6.5.81. Your reply to her offer to grant boons is exemplary: "I want only You and Your will." Of course, this is the most wonderful gift God can bestow: one who receives it will look on nothing else as worth having. It can fill the whole heart with an absolute sweetness, the sweetness of a Perfect Being's presence, and with the light of a Guidance that is unerring. But having such a Marvel enshrined within us must prepare us to stand with equanimity all that happens in our lives. For, just because the Eternal Beauty is lodged in our heart our days are not assured of smooth sailing. We are in a world of complex forces, chequered movements, which are natural to the limited mind, the restricted life-energy, the hampered and unstable body we possess. Difficulties, sufferings, failures are unavoidable - until the glorious hour in the future when what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supreme Truth-Consciousness, the all-transformative Supermind, descends in its fullness and evokes the same Godhead lying deep-hidden in
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each of our parts and the two by their combination begin a new race.
Religious people often complain: "We say our prayers regularly, we visit the temple on the right occasions, and yet many of our efforts prove fruitless, our bodies frequently fall ill, even some of our dear ones die before their time. Why all this when we are God's worshippers?" Whatever may be the causes of the mishaps these people meet with, they do not realise that their worship is not the soul's pure leap to its Maker: it is done with an ulterior motive - the desire for their own success, happiness, prosperity. God may grant appeals for personal benefits, but He also may not, and when selfish supplications are made He is not bound to respond to them. But what about his true devotees?
It is their misfortunes that raise the real question. But, as I have said, they too live in a world of imperfection and they too are themselves imperfect in their human parts. I remember once telling the Mother during a visit to the Ashram from Bombay: "Please arrange things so that everything may go harmoniously and no obstacles come in the way of my relationship with people and of my ultimate passage to you." The Mother replied: "Do you want the laws of the universe to change for your sake?" This did not mean that her blessings were not with me. But it meant that I, a mere human, who lived in the context of common existence, could not expect everything to happen according to my wish and convenience: even my path to the Divine would not necessarily run uncluttered. However, if one's inmost heart has been given to God and one feels that His wide wisdom and His beatific warmth are always with one, all untoward events will be intuited as happening with His knowledge and with His shaping hand secretly at work in them with care and love and the touch of a perfecting purpose. All unavoidable ill-luck will still serve His ends. Even at times He may grievously shock us into a rapid seeking of greater depths within us of intimacy with His infinite peace and His all-enfolding power. In any case, we shall have His company in the midst of every
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contretemps and recognise His hidden grace at each step across hurting stones. We shall hear Him saying like the Master-Sculptor imagined by a disciple of Sri Aurobindo:
Pain like a chisel I've brought to trace
The death of pain upon your face.
Or else His message will come to us in Sri Aurobindo's own words:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.
Best of all, we shall find the Mother saying to us as she did in response to a disciple's prayer:
"I am always with you. I shall never fail you in prosperity or in adversity, even when you sink I am with you - I sink with you: I do not stand on the shore and merely look at you from a distance. 1 sink with you, I am in you: for lam you."
you say that on 9.5.81 you saw a vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with your eyes open. As you know, it is the inner eyes that project their vision as if into physical space. But I would like to know how exactly the two figures fitted into the material surroundings within which they stood. Were they transparent, with their background showing through their bodies? Or did they assume a threedimen-sional solidity of form in their own subtle substance and seem to be a natural part of the earthly scene? Was the impression such as to make you feel that you could have touched their bodies?
You have asked me how you should study Savitri. The chief thing is to enter into its revelatory atmosphere. Read it so that your ear and not only your eye takes the poetry in. This means you must read it audibly. Further, try to receive the impact of the poetry as though the sound came from
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above your head and at the same time emerged from what the Rigveda terms the heart-ocean. This twofold arrival is the way of the Mantra. And the impact will tend to be received thus if you approach the poem with as hushed a mind as you can manage. Then within the mental stillness the sense will take shape and the inner eye will follow and distinguish the various contours of the vision-bearing thought and the inner ear will vibrate with the spiritual life-thrill accompanying that thought. Am I talking abracadabra?
(21.5.1990)
Your letter, as usual, is a long soliloquy - but it is not just X chatting with X but X communing with the Divine Mother whom he is nestling deep within him and with Amal whom he holds in some warm wideness of inner being.
The increasing apathy and detachment you speak of is basically the distance you feel from the old fellow you used to know as yourself. That fellow was full of responses and reactions and now he is not the whole of your being but a small part while the major space is occupied by One whom you can address most meaningfully with those lines of Manomohan Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's elder brother.
Augustest, dearest, whom no thought can trace,
Name murmuring out of birth's infinity,...
The other presence who edges out your usual being is nothing so lofty or so enrapturing but is ever an aspirant after the largeness and light which he dreams of as the poefs ambience so that some day it may be said of him in a phrase by your friend:
Far-visioned with the homeless heart he sings.
Your preoccupation with trees and flowers reminds me of a little experience I have been having these afternoons of visit
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to the Samadhi. Nowadays, owing to the increasing infirmity of my legs, the trudge from the Ashram Gate to the chair kept for me opposite the Samadhi is quite a strain. But(the strain of the body tends to vanish into a strain of music within me as I go looking at the several pots of plants ranged all along my passage. The continuous green of the leaves wafts to me a sustained heart-ease while the many-coloured and many-shaped blossoms seem to spring at me like fillips of sudden joy instilling an energy that is at once a light and a laugh.
This experience started as an occult answer to my need two weeks back. After each walk to the Samadhi courtyard my heart began to miss beats very closely, creating a marked discomfort in the chest. On returning home the same abnormality continued. Dr. Raichura, who verified it, was quite concerned. He got three cardiograms taken, one immediately after my homeward rickshaw-drive. All were most disappointing: they showed the heart throbbing away quite normally! The trouble, however, continued. I noticed that during those days there was a great diminution of the radiance I habitually feel in my mind and heart. Sorbitrate tablets, either swallowed or sublingual, were tried to promote better blood-circulation. But they acted only to cause a mild intoxication and a slight headache which went on for more than an hour. Dr. Dalai too lent a hand. He gave me the homoeopathic adaptation of Tincture Crataegus Oxyacantha (Hawthorne Berry), a heart-tonic once used by allopaths but now totally abandoned by them though much praised still by Hahnemann's followers. This tincture is a long-term treatment. No immediate result was noticed.
Then suddenly I had the experience of a big Shadow lifting from my head - and all was peace and brightness at once! For a day or two the miss-beats continued but I didn't care. One afternoon I completely forgot to take my pulse. The next day I found it normal. Both the doctors were glad to feel the heart running a steady course. Now, steady or not makes no difference. And I realise that my "illness" was
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really the attack of an occult hostile force to which I had somehow laid myself open.
I recalled that just before the abnormal phase I had been appealing to Sri Aurobindo, because of some vague unease, with that line from his poem Musa Spiritus: "All make tranquil, all make free." Somehow I had to pass through what the Bible terms "the Valley of the Shadow" (luckily not "of Death", as the Bible has it) before my appeal was answered.
It seems rather relevant in the cardiac context to note the whole stanza from which I had culled that line. It runs:
May I fancy that somehow my heart missed those footsteps again and again or else that they became too light, too airy, to be measured? Perhaps the best thing to say would be: "There was not alertness enough on my side to match all the possible ways in which the Eternal's love responds to the call of Time's heart."
The experience of the sudden lifting of a Shadow reminds me of what happened 17 years ago. I have written of it to a friend and I may repeat it here. I was in Bombay and had a pecubar fever with a most unpleasant feeling in the stomach as if a little ogre were sitting there and being most capriciously choosy about nourishment. No medicine worked. Late one evening, after a week during which there was just a passive waiting on the Mother, I inwardly saw a fist come down with force somewhere at the back of me and immediately the ogre jumped out of my belly and I was perfectly normal. The fever disappeared and the same night I had a most vivid meeting with the Mother in a dream. My whole heart seemed to leap towards her with such emotion as I have rarely felt. She was still in her body at that time, though
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incommunicado - towards the end of October 1973.
(4.5.1990)
My health is fine except for the legs which are not very willing to do their proper job. They may argue from the strain they undergo that a person who lives so much in his head does not need them very much. But somehow I persuade them to make it possible for me not to try going to the Samadhi on my head! I spend an hour and a quarter there happily lost in the in-world, though often enough my eyes are fully open, mostly to take the out-world's splendour - the wide-spreading "Service Tree", the various sparkling flowers on the Samadhi as well as the lavish plant-arrangements in the Ashram-courtyard - as a flame to kindle further the aspiration towards the Divine Dweller of the depths and the heights. Occasionally some distractions take place, some small communications with other souls and at times even odd incidents.
Once when I used to sit just outside Dyuman's room and not as now under the clock opposite the Samadhi, a fellow came and asked me, pointing to the room: "Can I buy T-shirts here?" God knows what gave him that outlandish idea. Could he have seen sadhaks wearing T-shirts coming out of the room? Another chap put me the question: "Where is the Samadhi?" He had his back to it. I said: "Just turn round to see it." Evidently he was a serious seeker, but 1 suppose he mistook the actual Samadhi to be a little garden of an original kind set up to prepare the devotee's mind for the paradisal atmosphere of the actual location where the bodies of the Master and the Mother had been laid to rest. A third visitor on another day inquired with a very concerned face: "How to meditate when it is so hot?" I replied: "Very simple. Just take your shirt off." His eyes widened as if a revelation had been made. The next day he appeared on the scene in a joyous state of shirtless spirituality. One day a lady acquaintance from Bombay came up to me and asked: "Are
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you any relative of Amal Kiran?" I said: "Not at all." She looked amazed. Then I added: "I am Amal Kiran himself." Her face showed still greater amazement. It seemed to her strange indeed that instead of being my relative I should be myself. I have rarely seen a mystic so mystified.
One more anecdote, now with a profound significance. A sincere soul complained to me: "I have a great difficulty." "What is it?" I sympathetically inquired. He answered: "I like to come to the Samadhi again and again." "That's ideal," I commented. He looked distressed and said: "I come here to look at all the pretty girls putting their heads on the Samadhi." "Well," I remarked, "don't give up coming, but offer to the Mother all the charming faces you like to look at. She'll be quite pleased with such a bouquet of devoted flowers. She doesn't mind what you dedicate to her. She is interested to see that you follow her master-formula of Yoga to us: 'Remember and offer'."
The man who had been distressed smiled with relief. He moved away and stood on the other side of the Samadhi. When he turned his eyes to the young heads bowing, 1 sensed a sort of distance in them. Some phrases of the poet Meredith's glided into my mind, far exceeding the occasion but not quite irrelevant. They are those in which, according to Sri Aurobindo,' "the metrical sound floats and seems always on the point of drowning in some deep sea of inner intonation" and which he considers to be "a description which might well be applied to the whole drift and cause of this spiritual principle of rhythm". Meredith speaks of the Spirit of Colour who leads
Through widening chambers of surprise to where
Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes,
Because his touch is infinite and lends
(12.6.1987)
1, The Future Poetry and Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1972), pp. 164-165.
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7
I consulted all your recent notes and found a number of points apart from the dream of changing houses. First is the alleged remark by Shaw about Sri Aurobindo being the greatest brain on the planet. It is true that Sri Aurobindo has come to be known in various places where we would hardly expect it. But I doubt whether Shaw could have delivered any such superlative estimate. He once visited India. A very pushy Muslim lady, with a very obedient painter husband who let her claim that she inspired all his work, boarded the ship as it lay in Bombay harbour in the morning and pinned Shaw down to a visit to her place where she would be inviting notable people, Shaw went there and was "lionised" - but after half an hour he was suddenly found missing. Evidently he couldn't stomach the pretentious superficiality of the occasion. It was quite late in the evening now. A search was made in the dark compound of the house and he was discovered sitting quietly in a car parked there. He refused to come back to the meeting - and when the driver of the car had been located he went straight to his hotel room. Long ago I published in Mother India a letter he wrote to a friend about the richness of the Indian pantheon and how it provided satisfaction to every kind of religious temperament. So he was no ignoramus about India, but I haven't found any reference by him to any Indian of his time. Sri Aurobindo has a magnificent survey of Shaw's mind and personality in a long letter to Dilip apropos of the Irish character and he has some shorter remarks in a couple of letters to me. If Shaw had seen these letters, he would have been delighted as well as enlightened. And the comment on Sri Aurobindo he has been credited with would surely have been quite apt from his mouth. As things are, you are right in feeling it to be apocryphal.
It may interest you to know that the Mother also once gave an opinion on Shaw, It is being recorded here for the
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first time and you will be the first Ashramite to read it. The topic came up in one of the "Prosperity" evenings before the Soup Distribution. She said in effect: "Shaw is a very independent mind, free from all preconceptions and able to penetrate through appearances and get to the reality of the problems facing the ordinary life. Conventions cannot deceive him. I don't know if there is anything deeper beyond this powerful capacity."
You have referred to reading my poetry. Now that the galleys of my projected "Collected Poems" are pouring in, I find myself plunged in an intense fusion of past and present. Most vividly the visionary moments with their far-reaching resonances come back with a cumulative force. I realise how Sri Aurobindo was bent on my writing always at my highest. Though quite considerate about my less inspired efforts and patiently pointing out the precise respect in which this or that line fell short either in imagery or rhythm, he never wavered in urging me to be dissatisfied with anything less than the mot inevitable. There is a sonnet entitled "Sky-rims" which he appreciated very much except for its last line which seemed insufficiently shot with the revelatory rum of sight and sound. To fill the lacuna I invoked the Muse day after day. Harin Chattopadhyaya was a close friend at the time and he too sportingly took up the challenge for me. Actually the fault of the non-revelatory line was that it ran:
To yet another revelatory dawn!
Sri Aurobindo found the adjective of my choice "flat and prosaic, at any rate here." The best I could do at the end of several experiments was:
To yet another ecstasy of dawn.
Sri Aurobindo's comment was: "It is better than anything yet proposed. The difficulty is that the preceding lines of the sestet are so fine that anything ordinary in the last line
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sounds tike a sinking or even an anticlimax. The real line that was intended to be there has not yet been found." I made one more attempt and wrote to Sri Aurobindo: "I have got Harin to put his head together with mine. He has come up with: 'lambency of dawn'. A good phrase, no doubt - but I wonder if it suits the style and atmosphere and suggestion in my sonnet. After over a fortnight of groping I have myself struck upon: To yet another alchemy of dawn!' Do you like my 'alchemy'?" Sri Aurobindo replied: "That is quite satisfactory - you have got the right thing at last."
You have quoted Nolini's generous remark whenever matters concerning poetry were at stake: "Consult Amal." From the beginning he closely followed my poetic career in the Ashram. He had a fine aesthetic sense and an intuitive insight but perhaps was not sufficiently aware of technical subtleties connected with metre and rhythm. Besides, he knew how much time Sri Aurobindo graciously gave me, discussing the minutiae of poetic expression - and he was the only one privy, after the first week of absolute secrecy, to the immeasurable boon of Savitri in progress granted by the Master to this beauty-smitten mystery-haunted disciple who for all his limping spirituality was yet passionately panting for the "Overhead" Parnassus. Naturally Nolini thought of referring questions of poetry to me. This was part also of his humility: he did not arrogate to himself any role in which he felt he was not anywhere near being an absolute authority. His praise was unrestricted when he saw merit. Thus, after Sri Aurobindo had given extreme praise to the last eight lines of "This Errant Life", I remember Nolini saying to Amrita that Amal had written something equal to Shakespeare. I had marked that delicate, exquisite, finely suggestive poems appealed to him the most. Apart from "This Errant Life", I recall his happily appreciative response to the sonnet "Devotee" and the two-stanza'd piece "Two Moments", all three of which you must have seen in the proofs corning to me at present.
Your meeting him so often at night is an enviable expe-
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rience. Your dream in which he asks Anima to give you some homoeopathic globules for some ailment of yours seems certainly to have brought an ultra-physical influence and I am not surprised that your painful knee which had prevented you from attending the Playground Gymnastic Marching for about twelve days was completely healed and you felt fresh and strong in the morning. I believe the sweet-tasting globules were symbolic of some aspect of the Divine Delight, Ananda, at work. This particular dream strikes me as a phase of sadhana. An unseen Power was in touch with you. Probably this Power keeps in contact with us all the time, even during our sleep, but it gets mixed up with a large variety of dream-movements which have nothing to do with our spiritual endeavour, and when it is at work we may not be consciously receptive to it. You were perfectly aware of what was happening. And in your case I feel convinced that your sleep is a mode of sadhana in which the surrender to the unseen Beneficence takes place with more the baby-cat's self-abandon than the baby-monkey's clinging.
Your quotation from a Bengali poem is very much to the point in the matter of what is called "Grace". The translation proper to English should run; "Such is the Lord's inexplicable grace that a heart of coal changes into a diamond and a robber turns into a saint!" Your comment too is quite appropriate: "Magic has its own way - it need not follow any logic." But we must understand "magic" here to be supra-rational, not infra-rational. And when we go to the supra-rational, we approach the Aurobindonian "logic of the infinite". For, in it there is nothing which can be called capricious or arbitrary, bom of a chaotic darkness. Everything there comes out of a Consciousness which is difficult for our human wits to penetrate by being the opposite of the chaotic and the dark: actually it is, as an old version of Savitri says:
Unseen because too brilliant for our eyes
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and as a later version tells us with a greater spiritual immediacy, an example of how Sri Aurobindo lifted his poem again and again to a higher level of revelation:
Veiled by the ray no mortal eye can bear.
Even things other than "grace" in the divine order are never quite dear. For instance, Sri Aurobindo once wrote that X was a bom Yogi: how then did it happen that he started to act queerly and finally left the Ashram? Maybe this too was grace: he was saved from the "disgrace" which might have resulted if he had continued being an Ashramite,Outside, he fitted well enough into the general milieu and even won some credit for his nationalist work. On grace in general 1 may hazard two remarks. First, it is inexplicable because it does not seem to act in a manner fitting the present circumstances. But I conceive grace as taking into account all the secrets of the past and all the mysteries of the future - the two unknowns lying hidden in our own depths which are open to the Divine's all-penetrating gaze. They form to that gaze a part of the present - a store of possibilities at the bottom of the very stream running from moment to moment. Secondly, take that sweetest sign of grace: the Mother's smile. Sri Aurobindo once observed that by an irony of fate the subject of this smile had caused a great deal of misery. People moaned and groaned, thinking that the Mother didn't smile at them during Pranam because she was angry with them or because they were in a most depraved condition, even though they were not aware of any depravity! It has been explained that merely a smile does not show approval. It may be just formal. On the other hand, the absence of it may be due to the Mother's being absorbed in some inner working on the sadhak in front of her. Again, if there was an inner understanding the Mother did not need to show her approval by a smile. Thus I never saw her beaming to Nolini or Amrita. They never took much time over the pranam and I could see the lack of formality and the brief quiet intimacy
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that was sufficient on either side. But I also noticed that whenever there was on the part of the sadhak a leap of the psychic being, the Mother's face was invariably wreathed in smiles. I have a poem called "Grace" in which the psychic being is offering itself wholly and asking for no boon of greatness or good fortune and is ready for all privation from the worldly viewpoint provided it could have from the Mother the sure sign of her recognition of it and the supreme gift of her all-enrapturing all-enriching love:
Take all my shining hours from me,
But hang upon my quiet soul's
Pale brow your dream-kiss like a gem.
Let life fall stricken to its knee,
If unto lone-faced poverty
You give your blessing's diadem.
Make of these proud eyes beggar-bowls,
But only drop your smile in them.
Here the inevitable link is flashed out between the psychic being's self-giving and the Divine's grace as manifested in that outbreak of plenary sweetness on the Mother's lips, her smile. I may generalise that any time the deep soul in us cries out to the Divine, the Divine's grace unfailingly responds. One aspect of the supra-rational logic of the Infinite behind the Infinite's magic which exceeds our rationality is this spontaneous relationship between these two phenomena.
Let me offer a small incident from my own life to illustrate that relationship. The period from the Mother's birthday on February 21, 1928 and Sri Aurobindo's on August 15 of the same year was for me a luminously crucial one. Although ostensibly an intellectual, I longed from the very start to have an opening in the heart-centre. The Mother, in order to make it easier for me, told me in what she considered terms most intelligible to me: "Think of or picture your heart as an open book." I somehow felt a little disappointed and said to myself: "What? Again a book? I am tired of being bookish!"
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As I had asked the Mother several times to let me have a profoundly emotional awakening to her divinity, a few months after her birthday a sudden opening took place. But it could not last. It even depended'on whether I lay on my back in bed or on my side! Lying on my back used to pull shut the aperture. When I told this to the Mother she laughed and so did Sri Aurobindo on her telling him that my psychic being peeped or drew back according to the lying posture of my body! But one day, even though 1 was lying on my back, there was a tremendous opening. I could hardly bear the ecstasy. I was breathless with unbounded bliss. Depth beyond depth seemed to bring forth a heavenly state -an indescribable enchantment of laughing flame and living fragrance rising far and far towards some marvellous Beauty. Hours and hours were spent in a felicitous aspiration. One early morning the call was so sweetly intense that I had to go to the Ashram, climb nearly half the staircase leading from outside Amrita's office to the Meditation Hall upstairs. I stood on the first landing all alone, yearning with all my heart towards the first floor where the Mother and Sri Aurobindo lived. All the doors were closed, but my body felt inwardly like one big open door of devotion. A few minutes passed. Then all of a sudden the door to the Meditation Hall swung outward and the Mother stood on the threshold looking at me with a smile. "Would you like to come in?" she asked. "Of course Mother," I cried out and quickly went up. She took me in by the hand and kept me with her for awhile. After this incident I could never dissociate divine grace from the soul's utter leap towards the Supreme Beloved.
Perhaps you are pretty impatient by now since I have not yet touched on the topic which was supposed to be the main one in the letter you were expecting from me: your recurrent dream of you as well as me changing houses. What is the drift of such a dream? A person who is pessimistic"? - might envisage a changing of "the house of clay" fairly soon: it would almost mean both of us quickly qualifying for rebirth
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hand in hand! Not a bad prospect for me. As Wordsworth said in connection with the daffodils:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company.
But, of course, rebirth is not the only result possible
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
We devotees of Sri Aurobindo would go to the subtle-physical plane where, according to the Mother, the Master after he had passed away would remain until his work was done. The Mother used the words "earth's atmosphere" for the subtle-physical plane. You may remember that she employed the same words in speaking of the Supramental Manifestation on earth. The subtle-physical plane is the earth's inner counterpart which may be said to mediate between the gross physical and the vital, the plane of the life-force. Once the Supermind in some form or other is there, it becomes a portion of earth-history and sooner or later is bound to emerge into the gross layer. In that world of rarefied physicality - hence the term 'atmosphere' - Sri Aurobindo, as the Mother has told us, has a house. People in the Ashram visit it sometimes in their dreams. Sehra did so on a few occasions and described something of it. Nirod too has been there at least once. So we, if we leave our present corporeal habitation in the near future, will get into contact with Sri Aurobindo's house which is now the Mother's as well, and not pass, with whatever vague interva] somewhere between birth and birth, into another "house of clay".
But this reading of your dreams is not compulsory. The house into which we move could very well be a new state of existence in the self-same body. Under the influence of that most holy house-agent - the soul in us - we may enter a better and ever better structure of mind, life-force and subtle-physicaUty which would ultimately affect our gross-physical
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itself and give it a finer presence, a richer ambience - some far-off yet genuine image of what a poem of mine visualises Sri Aurobindo to be like if he were moving amongst us:
Haloed with hush he enters, corona'd with calm he goes!
(2.6.1990)
1 am extremely happy that your brother's problem has been solved by the Divine Grace through an impossible-seeming event. He is a good man with true faith but sometimes the outer mind gets troubled and clouded. The Divine looks always deep inside and does not judge by surface realities. There is also the fact that your brother has the good luck of having for his sister one who is wholly devoted to the Spiritual Cause and, in spite of all difficulties, never swerves from the Light that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have brought to us poor wayward wandering human beings. I may add - taking my cue from the title of my own book of talks which introduced me to you - that you have cherished not only their Light but also their Laughter.
The Light shows both the true path ahead and the follies that have tended to sidetrack us. It makes us aware at the same time of God's strength and man's weakness so that we may know that the help is ever there to carry us onward and that such and such are the impediments put by ourselves to our own progress. But knowledge is not enough. Though the mind is enlivened as the Divine's disciple, the heart is still not uplifted into being the Divine's child. Here the role of Laughter comes in, together with that of Light. The Laughter ringing out from the hidden heights and depths proves to us that the Supreme does not take too seriously the burden we create for Him and is confident that He can bear us along further and further. This also saves us from being weighed down too much by our own failings. Not only are we encouraged by the Bliss with which we are surrounded from above; we are encouraged too to find that we can cut
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ourselves free from the despair about our defects instead of thinking them unforgivable by God and ineradicable by man.
The Mother once said that the most powerful weapon against gathering darkness is a smile. I may say that the demons may persist against Light but they get puzzled and quite upset on seeing our eyes twinkle carefree and our lips curve happily as a prelude to a burst of Laughter. This devastating gaiety rises from the heart and is made possible by the second of the two attitudes Ramakrishna mentioned: the baby-cat's attitude as dinstinguished from the baby-monkey's. The baby-cat surrenders itself to its mother's mouth in a state of happy abandon while the baby-monkey makes an effort with its own force to cling to its mother's belly. In the one the trustful joyous heart is acting, in the other the eager expectant mind. Neither of the two movements is to be neglected. But we as rational animals find it easier and more natural to be little monkeys. But then our anxieties do not disappear and an element of fear remains lest our strength should fall short of the demand of the Light. If we become baby-cats the fear vanishes, for a greater power than we can muster has taken charge: it laughs at the world's obstacles and is ready to do everything for us if only we let the golden bells of its infinite happiness find a silver echo in our tiny heart-beats.
The pure adhesion to the Divine Laughter is no easy thing. The human heart is sensitive and it is as much prone to grief as to joy. No doubt, it has the capacity of bubbling gaily, but blubbering grievously is also natural to it Only with more and more faith, with ever increasing trust, with a development of deepening love does the art of happiness become the heart's constant practice. And then suddenly there breaks out what Sri Aurobindo terms the "psychic being", the true soul, the. inmost core of the impulsive and emotional self, the spark of the eternal Ananda lit in the world of time as the centre of the Divine's evolution in the human. Once the secret soul has shown its face, its spontaneous rapture of the Supreme Presence will spread over all
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the parts of our life. Even in the midst of the mishaps and errors and ailments that cannot be avoided as long as we are not completely transformed by the Aurobindonian Supermind a taste of heavenly honey will be ours. And when this taste runs through all the varied food and drink of pungent, bitter or pleasant experiences that come and go, it is possible that the mind which usually clings to the Divine, with an endeavour of its own, will find the baby-monkey of its sadhana turn into a baby-cat. A soft silence, a soothing peace, an in-gazing quietness will tend to replace the old seeking after the Light. A meditation forming a wide-spread mirror under some unknown immensity above the head will be the general state. Then no effort at seizing truth but a hushed intense receptivity with a face lifted upward will be there and truth will itself suffuse the intellect, and the thinker will grow into the seer. The brain-cells will open to hold what the ancient rishis would have called the nectar of Knowledge. In such a condition Light will come as a revelatory Laughter. Indeed the Light of the higher planes is best considered the aura of Ananda and this ultimate nature of it is realised best by the mind's putting its own individuality helplessly in the care of the Unthinkable, the Unnamable. The English Language has a word which can very aptly suggest Light's being included in Laughter: the word "Delight."
(15.6.1990)
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SHAW AND SRI AUROBINDO
A Letter from K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar to the Editor
I was looking into the Mother India of October 1990, and chanced upon your remarks on Shaw and Sri Aurobindo on p. 652. On my first visit to U.K. in 1951, I visited 'Shaw's Corner', Ayot, St. Lawrence. This was on 22 September '51, and scanning his Library I saw prominently The Life Divine (the 2 volumes 1939-40 edition). Was the author of Man and Superman especially attracted to The Life Divine with its projection of the Future Man endowed with the Supermind?
Failing eyesight notwithstanding, it is a tonic experience to read Mother India.
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8
It is 4.58 in the morning. I have got Up nearly an hour earlier than usual. Before my eyes opened, there were these words in my mind: "He is everywhere" — and when I opened my eyes I spontaneously whispered: "Everywhere is He." Somehow the very next thought was to write to you. And I realised that a connection had been made between you and me through an invisible Omnipresence. I know that to say such a thing is rather high-flown and the spirit of our age is all for a subdued key where matters beyond the senses are concerned. But we must not fear to be poets and mystics. They do not belong just to one age or another. They belong to the subtle eternity that runs through all time - and equally valid today as at any moment in the past is that cry from Shelley's heart:
Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.
In far Germany you must still be asleep - unless my intense remembrance of you has momentarily pulled you outward or else more inward to that dimension in which the Divine Mother holds all her children together in the depths of her love. I have been graced with a general sense of this dimension, for there is in my heart a warmth and a glow which I feel in a certain measure to be simultaneously my own Little soul and a heavenly hugeness known to be Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, a hugeness with whom I am in intimate relation and within whom I perceive myself sweetly related to a multitude on whose lips the Two Great Names are a secret sound at all hours. When I think of one person or another, it is not as if they came into my mind from outside but as if they emerged into recognisable form out of some hidden world of the One who is Many. Now this morning you are vividly before me and I am writing to you not only as a response to your affectionate letter but also as though
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at a call from that manifold Unity.
The news you give makes me at once sad and glad. Your hint at a long confinement to a hospital bed in the early months of the year and your mention of being "tormented again and again with very aching attacks of lumbago caused by muscular atrophy" due to that experience - all this saddens me very much. But I am glad to see that your faith and courage are always present and even a sense of humour gleams out. That sense reminds me of something I said in my Talks on Poetry, a copy of which you received some months back with the most touching gratitude. I tell my students that I am being visited by this awful complaint -- "rheumatic pains in the lower back and loins", as the dictionary puts it. I explain how I shall make history by my battle with that hellish visitor to my body. "The history will be made in three stages. First, there will be a realisation of the full presence of the dread torturer - full presence summed up by my thundering out the name as it is: 'lumbago!' Next you will see me tackling the demon and sending him away by a mantric strategy of the resisting will. I shall shout: 'Lumba, go!' The last stage will find me quite relieved, a conqueror wearing a reminiscent smile and whispering with the sense of a faraway unhappiness, the almost fairy-tale expression: 'Lumb, ago' "
I am encouraged as a letter-writer by your saying that the opening part of a letter to a friend published in the July Mother India, dated 7.4.1990, helped you a great deal to counteract your ailment. Remember that when 1 appeal to the Divine at the Samadhi it is not merely for protecting you and keeping you going. The appeal is an extreme one, invoking the Mother to cure you. And along with my fervent prayer there come to my mind on almost every afternoon some phrases from a poem of mine, which I once quoted to you because Sri Aurobindo had discerned a touch of the Overmind in the second line:
What visionary urge
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Has stolen from horizons watched alone
Into thy being like a fathomless smile ... ?
I think the three verses breathe something of your present and your future in relation to the Divine. Your soul is seen peering into the dream-distances that are our approach to the immensity of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is isolated from the hubbub and hunger of the common world and wants nothing but the holy and healing influence of that far-seeming Perfection. Out of that remote prospect where earth and sky appear to meet, a happy message, too deep, too wondrous to be expected and to be comprehended, wafts secretly an assurance to your dedicated self, promising to you an image of its own all-transcending Bliss.
Your lament that your English is not adequate to explain things to me is unnecessary. You want me to read between the lines, but your lines say enough about the state you are in, both of body and of soul - and what they convey in the spaces between them is the aura of your sweet friendship to which no words can do full justice.
(6.8.1990)
Thank you for your kind thoughts about me and for the generous movements of your heart. Contrary to your own view, I find you a good and sincere person. When you have the faith that the Mother whom we adore in the Ashram and whom Sri Aurobindo put before us as the incarnate Shakti of the Supreme is indeed such and when you are convinced that she has protected you, helped you in critical situations and kept you alive by her grace, how can you consider yourself a "zero"? You are indeed her child and hasn't she said that no child of hers can ever be a zero? You condemn yourself because you have "sex impulses" and cannot cross the bar they set up in sadhana. Have you heard of St. Augustine? Although he had a Godward aspiration, sex impulses stood in his way. There is the famous cry of his to
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God: "O give me chastity — but not yet!" Again and again carnal desire lured him away from the path he longed to tread and in spite of his aspiration he could not bring himself to resist the temptations of the flesh. But in the midst of all side-tracks the flame of prayer to be free kept burning - and finally he got over his sensual hankerings. His tremendous difficulties and his ultimate triumph over them has made him in the Roman Catholic Church "the patron saint of chastity." He exemplifies the Mother's saying that our chief weakness points to what we are meant to represent in the list of the Divine's victories. A line to the very opposite of it is indicated by it as leading to our special individual fulfilment in spirituality. But always for this fulfilment God's grace is to be invoked again and again.
There is no cause for you to despair. It has been well observed that we are never defeated as long as we go on fighting and that there is no failure except giving up. The only thing I would like to add is that one should find the right mode of fighting. A head-on meeting of the lower movements with the force of our human will is not always the correct confrontation. The Mother has advised a turning away of the mind somehow or other when those movements are perceived. Open a book of Sri Aurobindo's or go out for a long walk or immerse your eyes in the beauties of Nature or else seek harmless happy company. She has also told us that nothing throws the hostile powers into disarray so effectively as laughter in their faces. Laughter at them blows off their pretence of overwhelming strength and evokes in us a sense of the Divine Ananda hidden in our depths. It stirs into activity the true soul of us that is sweetness and light and strength and an intrinsic unstainable purity. This "psychic being" is an effortless dweller in the presence of the Supreme, a spontaneous all-surrendering instrument in the hands of the Lord and by that winsome weakness a born king over life. Have the smiling confidence that Sri Aurobindo stands looking at you and beckoning you to freedom across even the darkest-seeming upsurge of physi-
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cal desire. Behind each devil God waits, masked, to be recognised and to be called for assistance in that peculiar context of difficulty which is most natural to your make-up. Never feel helpless. The Divine is within your reach every moment and in the thick of every temptation. Even if you fail at times to resist it, never think you are cast out from the Mother's love. Offer the failure itself to her with the faith that she will take note of it and save you from its recurrence. I believe I struck upon a great truth when I wrote to a friend in dire trouble: "There is no pit so low and deep that the Divine Grace cannot lift you out from it sky-high."
As for your job, why should you take it to be at a tangent from the line of sadhana? Whatever the job, tackle it with an inner dedication of it to our Master and Mother. We cannot always pick and choose our vocations, but all work is acceptable to the Divine if done with consecration to Him. It then becomes a gift from His own wise and compassionate consciousness.
(17.6.1990)
Two attitudes of yours are full of wisdom. You are ready for any kind of future and you have no complaints against life. When I probe these attitudes I see that they have their roots in the Yogi in you - or more accurately you the Aurobindonian. Whatever prospect opens to us in the time to come is bound to lead us towards the same goal - the heights of the Divine Master's all-enfolding serenity, the depths of the Divine Mother's all-soothing affection. We are in the hands of the one Divine's dual manifestation we have been lucky enough to know in terms of very earth and these hands can bear us only towards the goal of the Infinite and the Eternal whose attainment through the path of assuming a humanity like our own is symbolised by those feet at which our souls have knelt. Here two stanzas from that credo-poem of mine, "Triumph is All", surge up in my memory:
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Not only where Thy silver steps
Twinkle a night of nenuphars,
But everywhere I see Thy heaven:
I love the night between the stars....
The whole world is my resting-place:
Thy beauty is my motherland:
Sweet enemies are wounds of age -
My body breaks but by Thy hand.
These stanzas cover both the attitudes I have mentioned. They peer into the future and look around at the present, but all is seen as vivid generalities. The word "complaints" which you have used suggests particularities as well, including small day-to-day pricks no less than the larger obstacles the milieu may set up. A philosophical temper should suffice to bear things stoically. A religious approach would help one to read God's Will in all unpleasant events or else discern the after-effects of our own past Karma. But we Aurobindonians can practise a finer art of living in the midst of whatever big or small "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" the Shakespearian-seeming World-Drama may bring us. There is, first, the wide calm we have to develop or call into ourselves with the remembrance of Sri Aurobindo's face, about which one of his disciples has written:
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry -
A soul of upright splendour like the noon!
The human body through the ages has struggled for light and appealed to some celestial Mystery to put off its veil so that our life may not feel-dark with ignorance of the ultimate Truth. With the advent of Sri Aurobindo we have a revelation of supreme knowledge, a countenance whose eyes have visioned that Truth and which wears as a result the peaceful expression of a radiant life-fulfilment. Nor, I may add, is this
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knowledge confined to a powerful insight into the complexities of the various planes of existence: it is also a technique of transforming and harmonising our whole many-aspected nature so that this nature may no longer be a play of shine and shadow as at mom and eve but a shadowless glory as when the sun is at its midday zenith.
Yes, first there is the Aurobindonian crown of luminous calm to be won for ourselves. Then there is in its wake the sense of Sri Aurobindo's presence looking at us through all the vicissitudes of our little days. He has accepted us as his followers and thereby taken into his hands the tenor of our lives: he can meet us across every incident and turn it into a passage between our littleness and his greatness. If we are vigilant enough to realise that he has our lives in his charge and can convert all the apparent "slings and arrows" into his own dynamic messages, piercing our superficial selves and making ways for our profounder beings, our hidden souls, to come forth - if we have the faith that there is nothing he cannot use for the growth of our Yoga and if we constantly offer to him whatever takes place, no matter how unpleasant or hurtful, surely we shall meet his illuminating grace at every step and the missiles seeming to be hurled at us will prove to be a shower of blessings. Indeed, a twofold spiritual art of living is open to us beyond both common philosophy and religion.
Now a word on your experiences at night and in daytime. I repeat that night with its stillness and its opening up of a star-studded immensity calls out your soul in a spontaneous response and whether awake or asleep the inner and the outer in you are at one. I can understand very well that "burning aspiration" which you feel when by chance you get up from sleep at some hour of the night. Neither is your whispering of lines from Savitri or some other poem a surprise to me who am haunted by a hundred voices from the English-speaking poetic past or else the one superb voice from the present which sums them all up and exceeds them with a succession of rare revelatory rhythms -
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The lines that tear the veil from deity's face.
What puzzles me a little is why on rising at 4 a.m. to begin the day one should be troubled by a raid of unpleasant mechanical thoughts for some time. Perhaps your nights, with their dreams of happy contact with fine friendly beings, make too much of a contrast with the day's common routine and there is a lurking fear which opens the gate of your mind to the subtle influences of the "subconscient"? With most people it is the deep-engulfing sleep that invites
The demon and the goblin and the ghoul.
Of course, what happens to you can hardly be described in such terms. But some lack of smooth transition into the quotidian consciousness is responsible. Perhaps you get out of bed at once at the end of sleep. Try to stay within your mosquito-net for some time after your eyes have opened and review quietly the night's experiences and think peacefully of the waking hours ahead of you. And when the night and the day have met smoothly in your mind, step out of your bed. In a more jocular vein I would advise you to imitate what a relative of mine used to do whenever he had to get up at night to go to the bathroom. He would always keep one eye shut so that sleep might not fly away from him! If you could psychologically open only one eye at 4 a.m. and later gaze fully at the coming day, you would not feel too sharp a breakaway from the magic realms of reverie. In any case I don't think you should worry about those unwelcome mechanical thoughts. It is worrying that gives them strength. Just let them be and go about your business until the usual time when you start to read The Life Divine and, facing the prodigality of knowledge in it of all the aspects of our cosmos, say to yourself: "Surely, the author of this book must be the author of the universe!"
(4.8.1990)
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I am happy to learn that you have always taken an interest in poetry. The names you have listed bring a glow to my memory - Keats for the rich texture of his verbal felicities evoking significant imaginative pictures, as in his description of the sea-bottom:
...nor bright nor sombre wholly
But mingled up, a gleaming melancholy,
A dusky empire and its diadems,
One faint eternal eventide of gems -
Shelley for his subtle suggestions and haunting rhythmical patterns, like airs caught from another world:
A tone
Of some world far from ours
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one -
Wordsworth for his profound simplicities and his powerful visionary effects due to a philosophical mind attuning itself to a secret Spirit behind universal Nature, a Spirit which is also behind this very mind but mostly wakes to awareness of its own depths by touches of sound or silence or quivering colour from wood and stream, hill and sky. Well could he say,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,
and affirm feeling
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
You may have been out of contact with English poetry and, if my Talks brings back to you the happy thrill you had in times past, I shall think myself rewarded. I live in a vast
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inner world of many-moded poetry — scores of lines throng my memory and come to the forefront of attention either on their own or in answer to occasions and sometimes a stray word starts up a series of lines from various poets in which that word found apt use. Even a part of my Yoga comes from the sense of perfect form which the finest poetry achieves. The flawless, the unsurpassable, the archetypal, the transcendental, the absolute — the presence of such an ultimate goes home to me in a most magical way through the diverse modes in which poetry attains inevitability of expression, the acme of its fusion of matter and manner, its moved precision of measured speech. The subject may be anything, the style may be vibrant with any level of our multifold being and yet through the delicate or forceful unity of intense vision, word and rhythm the creative poet sets before me an airy but irresistible pageant in which gods of infinite bliss and goddesses of eternal beauty seem to interplay. I am stirred to a feeling of the Supreme and the Divine even when nothing directly spiritual is uttered by a poet, for what he says conjures up a sheer perfection of verbal form, at once meaningful and musical, as when Shakespeare tells me of King Duncan lying in his grave -
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well -
or when the same poet makes Romeo exclaim at first sight of Juliet's beauty at a ball given by her family:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright! -
or else when that distillation of the Stoic in the Roman temper is put in Caesar's mouth in Antony and Cleopatra:
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities,
But let determined things to destiny
Take unbewailed their way.
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Mantra after sudden Mantra leaps out to me from unexpected places because I respond not only to the many-passioned heart of poetry but also to the unimpeachable art with which it gets embodied, gaining an utterly ravishing outline for its inner substance. The result is that I catch in all shapes of the poetic intuition, be they ever so secular, something manifested of the spiritual reality which is figured in that couplet of mine which Sri Aurobindo declared to be revelatory in the Yogic sense:
Bodies of fire and ecstasies of line
Where passion's mortal music grows divine.
(12.7.1990)
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9
Your lament sounds genuine and, since it is so, you are sure to break open the closed recesses of your being. The fact that you have not come into physical contact with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother though they were on the earth in your lifetime is certainly unfortunate, but the conviction which you have that they were Divine Visitors to our world is strong enough to put you in inner contact with them. And remember that even now they are not merely discarnate spirits. Sri Aurobindo has given the assurance through the Mother that he would remain as a personal presence in "the earth's atmosphere" - that is, the subtle-physical plane, which is the plane closest to the earth - until the work he had undertaken is fulfilled. According to the Mother, he is there in a subtle-physical body very much like the form he had before but now perfect, "with the light of immortality upon it". At present the Mother too must be taken to exist on that plane in the same manner and active in the same way to fulfil in our world her transformative work. Always think of both her and Sri Aurobindo as still embodied beings and not only as pervading and guiding consciousnesses. By thinking thus, you will draw greater help from them towards your ultimate realisation.
Obstacles to the spiritual pursuit are there for each of us. The path is arduous and long, but once the innermost self has been awakened - the true soul within - we are never alone on the path. For, the true soul is a part of the Divine, a projection from the Supreme, and the Glorious Whole from which it has been put forth into the earth's evolutionary career is always with it. For us this Glorious Whole wears the august face of Sri Aurobindo or else bears the sweet features of the Mother. And since our Gurus have subtle-physical bodies we should be able to have with that Glorious Whole a more concrete and intimate sense of relationship than would otherwise be legitimate to assume. Of course, we can think of
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our Gurus as not only within us but also in front of us or above us, for the Glorious Whole is not confined to one place. It is not bound by our material space-laws. But, wherever we may feel it to be, we should be justified in believing that its essential eternity and infinity possess a concentration of them in a subtle-physical form in close rapport with us.
You may say: "The subtle-physical has still a distance from us and is not as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were at one time." True, but I may remind you that even at that time they were not always accessible to sight and hearing and touch. No doubt, other signs of their accessibleness were there - e.g., letters - but our sadhana used to go on with Sri Aurobindo mostly an imagined presence - a compassionate power in a far-off room. Can his absence now from that room make a radical difference? Here an incident from my own life may shed light on this question.
From the end of 1927 to the end of 1950, everything that I wrote - prose or poetry - was written with Sri Aurobindo in view. Each writing of mine was either read by him or read out to him and he commented on it. And I used to appeal to him for help with a sense of his bodily being. When he left his body I felt most disheartened. "What will happen now? Who will help my writing work as he used to do?" - such was my anguished cry. I spoke my thought to my friend, Udar, who at that time had access to the Mother in those few days after the passing of Sri Aurobindo when she had suspended her usual round of activity .On December 17, if I remember aright - 12 days after the great Transition on the 5th - she met her children again. One by one we went to her. When my turn came, she looked into my eyes and held my right hand with hers and said: "Nothing has changed. Ask Sri Aurobindo for help as you have done in the past and you will get it in the same way as then. Nothing has changed." Her words put some heart into me, but my mind was still vague.
Two or three days later I had a special interview with her,
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I was to fly back to Bombay where I was living at that time. Mother India was being edited and published from there every fortnight as a cultural newspaper covering all fields, even politics, from the Aurobindonian viewpoint. I said to the Mother: "Hundreds of people are waiting to get some light from us on what has happened. Will you kindly tell me the meaning of the event so that I may tell them?" She answered: "It is perfectly clear to me. But I am not going to tell you. You must find out by yourself." Then I said: "Mother, give me the power to do so." I bowed at her feet and she blessed me. Before I left her, some words broke out from me, which are not relevant to the theme I am dealing with but which meant a great deal to me at the time and may be mentioned to complete my record of the interview. Spontaneously 1 said: "Mother, your life is most precious. If it is possible in time of danger to give a sacrifice for your safety, if the offering of anyone's life in place of yours can be allowed, I shall be most happy to give mine." I knew that my life was a very small thing and it was foolish to think of its substituting hers in an occult transaction, but my sense of her preciousness, all the more after Sri Aurobindo's departure, was so intense that I could not help this gesture of love as of a son for his cherished mother. I am sure all of us would have been ready to save her, if we could, in this way.
Now back to my subject. After I reached Bombay I spent several days without writing a line. But an appeal was there to Sri Aurobindo: "If I cannot write something adequate to what has happened, all that I have written so far in my life means nothing. And if I can do justice to the tremendous event, I won't care whether or not I write anything else in my life. Help me!"
More than a week passed. Then suddenly I felt as if a light had fallen on my mind. I went to my table and sat at my typewriter. I typed non-stop for a number of hours. My article was ready with the title: "The Passing of Sri Aurobindo: Its Inner Significance and Consequence." It was posted to the Mother. A few days later I got a telegram from
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Nolini: "Article admirable. Fully approved by Mother. Nothing to change." I may add here what I heard from my Associate Editor, Soli Albless, who was in Pondicherry at the t he time. He wrote to me that the Mother had told our friend Yogendra at the Playground: "Amal's article is excellent. Tell him I am extremely satisfied." The next evening she said to Yogendra: "It's quite the best thing Amal has written. I would like fifteen thousand copies of it to be printed. He can get this done in Bombay. Otherwise I'll have the printing ' done here." My article first appeared in Mother India. Then it was made into a booklet, fifteen thousand copies as the Mother had wanted.
What do you gather from this story? As the Mother had told me, I asked Sri Aurobindo for help as if nothing had changed because of his leaving his body. The result was the best thing I had ever written. It proved the Mother absolutely right in assuring me that I would get inspiration from Sri Aurobindo just as before. And I have found during all the years since December 5, 1950 that Sri Aurobindo has never failed me. Whenever in my writing-work I have been up against a difficulty, even like facing a blank wall, I have put to him at night before going to sleep the exact problem and aspired for his help. Invariably something or other has turned up to pull me out of my predicament. Either the solution has come directly to my mind or I have come across a piece of writing in a book or an article to set me on the proper course or even presenting me with a ready-made answer. The long and short of my tale is that the lack of Sri Aurobindo's physical presence has not stood in the way of his assistance.
The same holds for the Mother. But I have observed that the response is most satisfying and even most prompt when, after offering my difficulty of any kind to her, I have stopped worrying about it myself. With a mental blank in me following the appeal, a confident complete detachment on my part from the problem, she has often brought about surprising results. Of course we cannot expect a recognisable
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solution every time. But neither did such a miracle happen when the Mother was in her physical body, though I have the faith that in all circumstances an answer from her was always there in some form or other we didn't immediately recognise. Our inner life is helped in however secret a way and sooner or later we discover the benefit. Her apparent denials are still acts of grace, for her love is ever present to bring our souls closer to felicity and fulfilment.
1 hope I haven't bored you with going on and on about just one point in your letter. The other important point is your concern that your wife, your son (12 years old) and your daughter (aged 171/2 years) should follow along with you the Path shown by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is a worthy concern, but don't let it be an oppressive one to them. Live your life as much as you can in our Guru's light but don't preach too much to your family and don't seek to impose anything on them. Let your own life influence them without your having to point out its merits or your remmding them every now and then of what they should do. Every soul has its own curve of development, its own destiny. We should not try to pressurise people to fall into one pattern. The old-time fanatic single-tracked religious spirit is wrong. Invoke the Mother's grace for your family, live in the atmosphere of inner communion with her and she will do the needful for the souls of your people. Encourage them when required, indicate quietly the right direction but never try to push. Stop worrying about their destinies. Your children are quite young and it is natural that they should be not as serious as you may be about matters like sadhana. If they have love and respect for the Mother, it is enough to start with. Let this seed sprout in its own fashion under gentle rain and mild sunshine. There should be no attempt at a forced "hothouse" growth. I expect your wife is in tune with your own aspiration and is spontaneously turned towards the Divine, but even with her you should not dogmatise or set up rails along which she must run.
As regards your own sadhana, I don't know what exactly
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to say. You speak of "the resistance of inconscience and unfavourable circumstances" and "fears of weakness and depressions leading to unspirituai mental processes in us". It is the common lot of all who try to swim upstream. The real remedy is to find something within us to which swimming upstream is the most natural thing in the world. It is the psychic being of which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have written such a lot. Once you get into touch with this true soul, there is a happy spontaneity in turning towards the Divine. The psychic being makes no effort to find the Supreme, for as I have said, it is itself a part of the Supreme. From its deep place within our hearts, devotion and self-dedication flow automatically. There are several parts which are not in accord with its unforced movement. Instead of fighting with them in the name of an Ideal held by the mind, it is more practical to put these parts into contact with that inner fountain of surrender to the Divine. A general equanimity, a quiet confronting of circumstances, including those of our own many-shaded nature, is called for and, along with it, a gesture of putting them all before the Mother. Visualise her face and figure and remember those lines from Savitri:
Immortal rhythms swayed in her time-bom steps;
Her look, her smile awoke celestial sense
Even in earth-stuff, and their intense delight
Poured a supernal beauty on men's lives....
Her inward help unbarred a gate in heaven;
Love in her was wider than the universe.
The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.
If you can conjure up the Mother's presence before you in bodily shape and let the inmost being in you put into her hands all your difficulties gathered together as if in a heap, the poignancy of your problems will disappear and the way will be clearer for your soul to suffuse the rest of your psychological self. The "unspirituai mental processes" will
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cease to bother you. If you are worried about your family's future because of certain tendencies which seem to you unspirituai in them, take them up again inwardly as though in a bundle and put them into the Mother's guiding and gracious hands. I may say not only "gracious" but also "graceful", for indeed they had an exquisiteness about them. I recollect once telling her: "Your hands in a certain posture remind me of Mona Lisa's as painted by Leonardo. I almost see those hands passing from that picture into yours." She replied: "It sometimes happens that certain bodily features of one's past birth are repeated in one's new form."
Your letter ends with the words: "Regards to your great self." The term "great self" translates accurately the Upa-nishad's Mahan atman. This Mohan atman is not anybody's private possession, except in the sense that it is a profound non-public secret, but it is in that sense the private possession of everybody, a universal consciousness which is one in all, hidden in you no less than in me, and waiting to be felt through an ever wider practice of what I have called "equanimity".
(13.7.1990)
X would be wrong in conceiving me as ambitious to make anybody my disciple. I offer nothing else than the deepest friendship I am capable of and I strive always to communicate my small attempts to be a mere tool in the all-guiding hands of Sri Aurobindo and be taken by them through every movement of life to the radiant feet of his companion and co-worker, the Divine Mother - feet that hold the sense of all journeys done and the promise to us that we world-wanderers will at last reach home by surrendering ourselves to them.
You have given me a good glimpse of your life when you were in service. It is a rare quality to pray to God to pardon whoever hurts one. And it is also rare to search for some fault in oneself which may have brought about the criticism,
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instead of being so filled with one's own merit as to resent the critical word or act. But the sensitiveness of which you speak is a weak point. One should have a calm and a poise which are beyond disturbance. Short of them, one should say to oneself: "Am I so important that nobody has the right to criticise me? Surely not. On the other hand, why should 1 attach such importance to people that what they say would have the power to hurt me? Neither I nor they really matter. Let me inwardly offer everything to the Divine. Whatever He wants should be done with me and in me."
To be strict about truth is a fine trait too, but the strictness must not be schoolmasterly. One should not be always on the watch to find reasons to punish; rather one should seek excuses to forgive. There is a Latin tag: Fortiter in re, suaviter in modo, which may be translated: "Firm in principle, gentle in practice." What is called "the human touch" has to be in action everywhere. My physical mother taught me in Parsi Gujarati: "Don't look simply at the chaal of a person, consider chiefly his haal" - that is, not just the conduct of a person but first of all his condition and his circumstances are to be kept in mind. Utmost clarity in the head, utmost charity in the heart - these must be our guides in all domains of life.
I am very much moved by your concern about me, your constant prayer for my health. I am sure your prayer will be answered - and I pray to be worthy of your love.
(22.7.1990)
It was most heart-kindling and mind-stirring to receive your enthusiastic response to my series in Mother India. Rarely does one get such appreciabon - and not only appreciation but also insight. An additional pleasure in reading your letter is the eloquent way it is written. There could not be a better review of my "Life-Poetry-Yoga". If this is what you call at the end "childish chattering" on your part, I wonder what unthinkable masterpieces would flow from your pen when
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you reach articulate adolescence and then pass on to expressive adulthood!
You have asked me what source my mind draws from in these communications. I don't know how to reply on my own. I'll convey to you - for what it may be worth - the memory which floated up when I closed my eyes and put your question to the Mother. I heard her repeat the words she had once spoken to me: "You have been painting pictures of flowers for me for years. Now I have the idea of putting in each room a flower-picture with its significance written below. For your room I am choosing the flower which means 'Krishna's light in the mind'."
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10
Your long letter was a great relief. You have been on my mind ever since we last got a ghostlike sense of your presence somewhere. Your total disappearance puzzled and worried all your friends. In the meantime we heard nasty news about the activities of your ill-wishers. You must have come to know of them too. But you are a soul as tough on one side as it is tender on the other - a sort of Belisarius though not battered by Fate so horribly. Belisarius was the greatest general during the reign of Justinian in Rome. Both he and his emperor married dancing girls. The empress conspired his ruin and had him degraded. His wife ran away with a monk. In the end the once-famous soldier used to stand under the Arch of his own triumph in Byzantium - a blind beggar yet unbroken in spirit. Longfellow in a poem on him concluded by weaving a versified version of the hero's own words:
The unconquerable will
This, too, can bear; - I still .
Am Belisarius!
As long as you are you and, what is more, feel intensely that you are a child of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, nothing can down you. You are a born fighter, but we are very glad that in being courageous you did not forget that, when occasion demanded, even Krishna, as Sri Aurobindo has told us, could be discreet and did not consider it un-Avataric to run away.
Your attitude to the super-Shakespearean "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" is profoundly illumined. You have turned all the wounds into openings to the Divine. The cuts and thrusts have not stopped at the outer ego: they have been received by you in the inner soul where the Divine is seated and where that secret Presence can use them to fuel
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the sacred fire burning towards an ever greater Consciousness. And how have you done this alchemic reception of the hurtful dross? The answer is simple: whatever happens to you, you have offered to the Divine with ah intense faith and devotion. Accepting your offering, the Divine has made the "Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man", which is the Upanishad's vision of the evolving soul in us, grow in bliss and beauty within you and come closer to the splendour and strength of the Supreme Himself.
The vivid picture you have drawn of the emergence of the new You from the old is rather over-critical of the latter. The adjectival torrent in which you have sunk the old fellow - "What a smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, puffed-up, complacent, pretentious and hopelessly gullible intellectual booby I was" - out Hamlets Hamlet in his passionate polysyllabic pessimistic mood, as when he cries out -
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Are to me now the uses of this world -
or in a grander gloomy style he rages in poetic prose: "This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical dome fretted with golden fire, - why, it appears to me no other than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."
It is always salutary to see one's shortcomings clearly and you have done well to pass beyond the stage where you were before the multiple blows fell on you, but to us the person we knew deserved none of the derogatory hammering you have given him, except perhaps the epithet "gullible" in your relationship to the friend who has betrayed you. We see your life's passage to be from "fine" to "finer" and we don't at all think we poured our love upon an undeserving uppish chap. It is your foe, masked as friend, whom the adjective-fluent Shakespeare would have called a "lecherous, treacherous, smiling villain" and who by digging your grave
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in secret is accurately hit off in that magnificent impeachment in Measure for Measure:
man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven '
As make the angels weep.
To turn to a much more pleasant dispute, let me touch on a discussion I have been having with our mutual, widely cultured English friend, a sincere devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, one who means a great deal to me and whose fine aesthetic judgment has been a powerful spur to my career as a poet. Lately she has reacted rather over-emphatically against a certain tendency of expression in English which seems to come more easily to non-English speakers than to native ones. My impression is that she has a point but that in a language like English, so multi-rooted, plastic, vari-mooded and open to "liberties", all tendencies can become naturalised. One's sense of any strangeness should not solidify into a barrier - unless a writer is found patently ignorant of the idiom. Our friend has said: "My English soul rebels at abstract nouns preceded by the definite article. It's o.k. in French of course!" Thus, when she was here last year she remarked that the title of my book on Mallarme's symbolist poetry - The Obscure and the Mysterious - was not quite English. In my recent correspondence with her I cited several uses of the kind from English and she wrote her comment on them:
"For my own interest I will try to analyse my 'intuitive' reaction to the examples you quote, and add some of my own:
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Typical
"The Everlasting"
(Shakespeare)
"The Slain" (ditto)
Shelley's "where the
Eternal are"
"The Naked and the
Dead"
(used as a novel's title)
Blake's "the eternals"
Hots de categorie
'The Eternal"
"The Supreme"
(used by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother)
Shelley's "The One".
"The Many"
"The flight of the alone
o the Alone" (after
Plotinus)
A-typical
'The Divine" (The
Mother)
"The Ineffable" - "the
Inane"
(Sri Aurobindo)
"The Obscure and the
Mysterious" (Amal's
book-title)
"The Art of the Soluble"
(title of Medawar's book)
I was most intrigued by her looking askance at "the Divine", I have four times employed this locution in the first part of this very letter and we come across it every now and then in not only the Mother but also Sri Aurobindo. According to our friend, an English-speaking person would expect to see "God" in contexts where the Mother says "the Divine". She adds: "Admittedly it is grammatically correct and functionally effective - we know what is meant. We also know that the Mother had special reasons of her own for avoiding the word 'God'. Nevertheless we feel that the Mother, being French, could not have been aware of the horrid effect of 'the Divine' in English - it sounds like an euphemism and therefore to the English ear, accustomed as it is to hearing a spade called a bloody shovel (if you will pardon the coarseness of the expression - I merely wish to stress a tendency to directness in the language which makes it difficult to avoid a commonly accepted word without sounding phoney or hypocritical or simply 'foreign') - to the English ear if s odd." Our friend also insists that the correct translation of "le Divin", when used in French where it would be natural, is not "the Divine" but "the deity" or the "the Godhead". She supposes that Sri Aurobindo used the expression "the Divine"- out of deference to the Mother's wishes, "because he wrote "The Hour of God' and 'God shall grow up while wise men talk and sleep' and 'A step and all is sky and God.' He did not write 'The Hour of the Divine' -thanks be to God!"
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I wrote back:
"I am afraid you are overdoing your English soul. No doubt you have on your side the fact that no English dictionary, not even the OED, cites an example on 'the Divine' down the centuries. But the American Random House Dictionary of the English Language (College Edition, 1969) gives on p. 388, col. 2 seventeen uses of 'divine' and the eleventh use notes: 'the Divine', a. God, b. (sometimes I.e.) the spiritual aspect of a man; the group of attributes and qualities of mankind regarded as godly or godlike.' No quotations are given as examples, but 1 suspect writers like Emerson and Whitman can be drawn upon. At least in the American philosopher Josiah Royce's book, The World and the Individual, published in 1901,1 have chanced upon the phrase: "...in the world as a whole, the divine accomplishes its purpose, attains its goal...."1 The Divine' may not be British but it has historically proved to be English, even if transatlantically English. And now that such a master of languages as Sri Aurobindo has set his seal upon this use, with so insistent a significance, all ears should get attuned to it."
In my latest letter I wrote:
"1 have been keeping my eyes skinned for the use of 'the Divine' in English. Casually turning the pages of Bernard Shaw's Three Plays for Puritans in the Penguin Edition, what do I chance upon on pp. 133-34? In the 'Prologue' to his play 'Caesar and Cleopatra' included here Shaw imagines an Egyptian god addressing the modern audience. Towards the end of the 'Prologue' the god says: '...I had not spoken so much but that it is in the nature of a god to struggle for ever with the dust and the darkness, and to drag from them, by the force of his longing for the divine, more life and more light.' Now here is the use we are looking for in English literature itself and by one of the most modern minds. What is equally striking is that - but for the small d - the utterance might have come from a book of Sri Aurobindo's!
1. P. 292 of the edition by Dover Publications inc.. New York.
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"After this discovery I came across a few more examples. My friend Ravindra Khanna drew my attention to an incident connected with Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' For years and years in both England and America critics have exercised themselves over the question of why Tennyson's 'pilot' remained on board after the vessel had crossed the harbour bar. Tennyson's explanation was that the pilot had been on board all the time, but in the dark he had not seen him. The pilot, he said, was 'that Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us'.
"Again, there are those lines in AE's 'Star Teachers':
These myriad eyes that look on me are mine.
Wandering beneath them I have found again
The ancient ample moment, the divine.
The God-root within men.
"Further, Paul Theroux, after visiting writer Jan Morris's house near Cruccieth, Wales, related in the course of commenting on it and on her that she wrote, 'Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing...'
"Finally, in addition to my early citation from the Random House Dictionary, let me quote Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language: 'Divine - often cap: something having the qualities and attributes of an ultimate reality that is regarded as sacred.' The example given is: 'man's relation to the Divine.' "
My latest discovery is the title "Depicting the divine in Nature" of a review of Early Poussain Exhibition in the weekly from London, The Times Literary Supplement, October 28-November 2, 1988, p. 1204.
If you run into any helpful phrase - preferably in English literature - bearing on the bone of contention, do pass it on to me. I am waiting for our friend's reply.2
(9.12.1988)
2. The friend was gracious enough to close the discussion by saying that she too had recently come across occurrences of "the Divine" in current English writing. - Amal Kiran
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Postscript
The suggestion that Sri Aurobindo started using the term "the Divine" "in deference to the Mother's wishes" may be too broad in its sweep, but a brief check by a friend indicates that his use occurs only after he met the Mother - that is, after March 29, 1914. A light perusal of some of his pre-1914 writings, including The Yoga and Its Objects, Thoughts and Aphorisms, early commentaries on the Isha and Kena Upanishads and early essays in Vedanta, Hinduism, Yoga, etc. (commentaries and essays published in Archives and Research) shows not a single instance of the term "the Divine" and hundreds of instances of "God".
The earliest use of the term occurs in the September 1914 issue of Arya: it occurs on p. 9 in the second chapter of The Life Divine and p. 48 in the second chapter of The Synthesis of Yoga, as published in that journal.
However, it may be noted that in the 1913 essay "The Evolutionary Aim in Yoga" the seventh paragraph (see reprint in Bulletin, November 1982, p. 10, lines 22-23) has the sentence: "The human first touches the divine and then becomes the divine." The use here is not quite the same as the term "the Divine" for God, but it does evince a verbal turn in which the later expression may find a plausible basis for its development. So the seed for the actual term may be traced in pre-1914 days: the term itself takes shape after Sri Aurobindo's association with the Mother and with the growth of that association it becomes markedly common. The letters to the disciples teem with it, but nowhere does Sri Aurobindo give any sign that he was doing something somewhat unnatural in the English language.
*
Your ideal and aspiration are admirable when you say: "My one regret so far is that I am still to nurture a flower of purity, perfection and harmony in me to offer at the feet of the
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Divine..." But as the state you aim at cannot be achieved in a short time, the important question is: "What do you do meanwhile?" The real job of the idealist and the aspirant is to offer at the Divine's feet all the impurities, all the imperfections, all the discords in him. What is crucial and central is the act of offering and, as a result, the receiving of the Divine's guidance from within, which would help one to be a little less impure, less imperfect, less discordant the next time. I don't mean that one should not on one's own try to outgrow one's all-too-human state, but the secret of sadhana is to put oneself in the hands of the Higher Power and get its guidance from the deep heart instead of planning all the time by the light of one's own tiny candle of intelligence.
To be dejected because the wonderful flower you mention is far off is hardly the right frame of mind for a sadhak. The fact that you have become aware of the need to reach the Supreme is a tremendous grace. To respond to the touch of this grace you have to put at its disposal whatever happens from day to day and get free of the wholly personal element with which we usually meet the calls and challenges of the relationships and circumstances in whose midst our hours are spent. Nothing is too trivial for the Divine's attention. When the Mother and Sri Aurobindo were with us bodily, they welcomed our wish to be led by their wisdom and power in everything. No doubt, they may have wanted to be free from inquiries like "When I get out of my bed in the morning, which foot should I first put on the floor?" -though I know that even such banalities they patiently dealt with. But I have seen how most naturally and interestedly the Mother attended to two pleas for help which I dared to convey to her in spite of the evident disapproval of her attendants. They were from a friend of mine. One was: "I suffer from constipation" - and the other: "I can't sleep properly in the afternoon." I could see from her face that she appreciated the naivete with which these messages had been sent as if to an actual physical mummy raised to the nth degree. I could see also that an answer from her conscious-
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ness was spontaneously going forth. Of course, my friend knew that he had himself to get in contact with her inwardly in these as in other matters, but to bring them outwardly to her notice when her divinity was-with us in an embodied condition was understood to help one all the more. And the Mother accepted in a wide sense the responsibility she had incurred by getting embodied.
No doubt, we had to avoid the mistake of thinking it just a,matter of course to consult her: a genuine prayer, a true self-dedication had to accompany the gesture of informing her. Similarly, you have to sincerely appeal to her for guidance after setting before her all the movements of your daily life without making up your mind in advance as to what you should do on one occasion or another. If you follow this practice in as much detail as you can manage, you'll see the slow yet sure progression towards the spotless, flawless, perfume-pervaded lotus you dream of as the life you want to offer to those Feet that are the ecstatic end of all journeys.
Now to your attraction towards poetry apropos of my reference, in a compilation by me of mostly my letters to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and their replies, to that stanza of Sri Aurobindo's which I consider to sum up with mantric power the goal of the Integral Yoga:
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.
The variations you suggest are poetic enough - "silent" or "wordless" instead of "voiceless" - "meeting" in place of "that meets" - and for the third line either
A mind unwalled and merged in the Infinite
or
A mind unhorizoned in the Infinite.
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But when poetry comes from the sheer overmind to constitute the mantra the order no less than the choice of the words and the wide as well as the weighty rhythm they create are of basic importance and significance. In your versions the sense of remote distances of divinity getting caught with an intense yet quiet immediacy is lost in what Sri Aurobindo would have called bright combinations and permutations playing about in the plane which he has termed "the poetic intelligence". Your "silent" has no surprise in it. One would mentally expect it. "Wordless" is rather feeble and lacks sufficient concreteness. Nothing except "voiceless" will convey an absolute and ultimate quality at the same time that it gives an almost physical substance to the "delight" which refrains from declaring itself with a voice. The silence becomes substantial, the wordlessness becomes seizable -and they have to be such if "arms", the instruments of the body's aspiration, are to get, by self-dedication, into touch, however subtly, with a "supreme delight". This delight, in order to be capable of giving contact to our physical self, has to exist as a Being of Bliss and not as an impersonal ananda. You cannot replace "voiceless" without attenuating the spiritual suggestion appropriate to the matter-part of man the aspirant. In the second line to substitute "meeting" for "that meets" is to bring about a monotony of rhythm in relation to the first line's "taking". Besides, the vividness of "Life"'s performance of an action is lost. "Arms" has an inbuilt vividness: "Life" hasn't and needs to be made "living", as it were, by making it directly do something. Such doing would prepare and be in tune with the "close breast" Sri Aurobindo ascribes to it at the line's end. Your third line is too fluid in both the versions. The first version has again no surprise: "Merged" is commonplace. The second is more picturesque with a typical Aurobindonian word - "urihori-zoned" - but it is wanting in strength. The original's massiveness and power of movement, partly due to the unusual past participle "dissolved" and partly to the flanking of "mind" with two qualifiers each on either side, produces
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the impression of something specially done to the mind by a sort of two-pronged attack for infinitising it. The attack is all the more vigorous because both "unwalled" and "dissolved" are two-syllabled and have a mutually reinforcing effect by the d-sound along with the d-sound common to them.
Your experiment with the last line -
Lull one with an ineffable rest -
is not only the weakest of your proposals and metrically unsatisfying but also a complete misunderstanding equally of Sri Aurobindo's spiritual revelation and of his syntactical structure. His line represents the fourth limb of the plenary or integral realisation: it does not just round off the combination of body, life-energy and mind. The word "Force" is a noun and not a verb as your "Lull" is, and "one" is not a pronoun standing as the object to "Force". Sri Aurobindo wants to say: "Force that is one with what seems its utter opposite - namely, rest - but what is, in a way beyond imagination, not really so." The comma after the third line's "infinite" should have alerted you to Sri Aurobindo's continuation of his series of the superb realities to be experienced.
I may remark that the six-syllable adjective "unimaginable" cannot ever be replaced. Its length is essential to suggest not only the extreme wonderfulness, which keeps defying even conception, of the state spoken of but also the sustained sovereignty packed into a "rest" which can be equated with "force". In comparison, "ineffable" is piffling.
(18.10.1990)
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11
I was most happy to get your letter and the "Triple-Life" tablets. From this afternoon I'll start being triply alive. In the meantime, with whatever warmth of a single life I have, let me thank you for both the wisdom and the wit of your letter. Yes, wit has come in, whether you meant it or not. Of course, "always and all ways" is a conscious expression, but I don't think you intended a paradoxical pun in writing: "A world gone illiterate by increasing degrees" - that is to say, the more the academic qualifications obtained, the more incapable the world grows of a true reading of life's riddle! Then there is the phrase: "...as fast as glych and glamour are being embraced." Doesn't "embraced" get a double sense - a literal no less than a metaphorical one with "glamour girls" getting evoked?
Now for the wisdom: "To be a poet is to be the freest being in the universe; one sings the Song of Songs (to God) every second of one's life." Even here, I believe, the wit has stolen in. Look at the word "universe". You could have chosen "world". The "verse" in your choice chimes very suggestively with the poet's existence and activity. It is as if the world had as its origin an all-unifying master-maker of verse. The idea of the poet's freedom is a basic one and its relationship to singing God's praise is inherent. For, the poet's imagination soars above the earth's so-called realities to a super-sphere where dwell the idealities of all things, waiting to be embodied here. There is no hold on him of things as they are: he is in tune with that secret presence which "the poet's eye" in Shakespeare, behind the sight fixed on the interplay of outer motives and surface actions, conjures up -
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
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And this mysterious universal presence is a representative of what in its plenitude is above on the one hand and deep below on the other - the Supermind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, that has to manifest from its free domain and to emerge from its involved splendour in the cryptic base of our evolutionary earth. It is to this plenary Being that the poet addresses his rhythmic rapture. The Biblical term "Song of Songs" is most apt, for here is not only the quintessence of all poetry but also the profound accent of love, the spontaneous movement of the inmost heart. Hasn't Meredith spoken of poetry as the outflow of
Our inmost in the sweetest way?
The Biblical term brings even more than the warmth of love: it brings inevitably the glow of wisdom. For the Song of Songs is attributed to that legendary fountain of sagacity: Solomon. The poet whose mysterious stirring you feel within you is your "psychic being", the soul to whom Sri Aurobindo attributes an intrinsic "sweetness and light". Light here stands for an outbreak of God's truth - an infallible guidance from within, accompanying the sweetness that is an unfailing joy in everything and an unreserved affection streaming out to all. If indeed, as you generously say, I woke the sleeping poet in you, you must be right in holding, as you do, that the Mother sent you to me from far America. I could not have done you better service nor served the Mother in a finer mode. For to be a poet is to be like Sri Aurobindo in an important lifelong aspect. Hasn't he said that he was born a poet (as well as a politician): all else he developed. Perhaps it would be a fuller view of him to say that the future Yogi whom he developed lay in seed-form in the poet: from the rhythmic word grew the sense of the divine harmonies that lie at the base of the cosmic movement. Similarly, the born politician held implicit the dynamic visionary of a perfectly organised, faultlessly governed "One World", of which a free and renascent India was meant to be the pioneer.
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I like very much your emphasis on what I once told you on the tape. It has been not only your mainstay, but also mine. For I am an embodiment of the falling and rising act. My poor legs symbolise the downward propensity but my arms always stretch upward, ever beyond ordinary human reach and invoke the grace without which I can get nowhere. 1 once showed the Mother a pocket photo I had of her and our Master: behind it I had written "Help of the helpless." She contemplated the phrase for quite a time with a tender smile on her face, accepting the role in which I had cast her. Mention of this incident sends my mind back to an evening in the early 'thirties when a few of us used to sit in a semicircle in front of the Mother in the old "Prosperity" Room before the Soup Distribution downstairs. The question came up: "Who sends appeals to the Mother the most in day-today life?" She picked out two sadhaks. One was Dorai-swamy, the devoted advocate from Madras who visited the Ashram every week-end and was part of the group in the "Prosperity" Room. The other was Amal. This selection did not denote that either Doraiswamy or Amal was more deeply devoted to the Mother than the rest of those present: Nolini, Amrita, Pavitra, Dyuman, Champaklal, Lalita, Tajdar, Chinmayi, Dara, etc. It simply denoted that Doraiswamy and I turned inwardly to the Mother most frequently for help because we found ourselves more often than the rest in need of it, being unable to manage our affairs by our own strength. It must be our acuter sense of dependence on her Grace, that made us appeal continually to her to keep us moving on the Great Path. We felt repeatedly that without her assistance we would be nothing. We lived again and again by the sheer power of her impulsion and her protection.
Surely it was she who picked me up safely times without number from the dangerous physical tumbles I was prone to experience because of a defect in my left leg - and from the still more perilous tosses due to my many-mooded, variously-drawn, complexity-shot nature prone to change on a
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sudden not only from sinner to saint but also from the right-moving Yogi to the easy-going stroller on the Left Bank of the Seine! The cry from the "Latin Quarter" and the call to the Indian Wholeness of spiritual being have been equally strong. Nothing except the vigilant and compassionate eyes of the Divine Mother could have led me to where I am at present. I recollect asking her whether the Supermind could transform an aspirant in spite of himself. On receiving a "Yes," I exclaimed: "Then there is hope for me!" I believe the drift of that affirmative answer was: "If the central part of one wanted the transformation, the Supermind directly acring would nullify the resistance and the denial by the peripheral parts. Otherwise these are able to have their say in whatever degree despite the central one's opposite pull," Even short of the Supermind, the guardian power of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has alone saved me from utter failure. All that I have done on my side is never to give up aspiring from my frequently supine situation in the dust. This has carried me a fair distance and, though I am pretty far from being much transformed, there seems now to be no escape from the purlieus of some inner heaven. Perhaps if 1 Live long enough beyond my current octogenarian phase I may come within sight of the threshold of that future which Sri Aurobindo has visioned:
A little more and the new life's doors
Shall be carved in silver light
With its aureate roof and mosaic floors
In a great world bare and bright.
I appreciate your concern for my health. There is nothing radically wrong with it. The only trouble is deteriorating legs. I don't move about unless it is absolutely necessary. Luckily my life-style does not call for much movement. I can easily make the transition from the chair in which I do most of my reading to the chair where I sit to type. Inwardly the attempt is at transition from the human type to the divine archetype -
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and to do that I do not have to move even from one chair to another.
(26.2.1990)
An exploration of my drawer has brought to light three letters of yours - still unanswered. Shouldn't I rather say "brought the light" of them? For indeed they are shining with your soul and, coming from its depths, reach into mine like a sweet and soothing smile conveyed through you by our Divine Mother; Yes, it is She, the eternal radiance, who passes between us in the form of words. And that is why our friendship is so full - even without words - and a vibrant communicative silence holds us together in the gap between letter and letter. This silence makes strange my other expression: "still' unanswered." Although words have not gone forth from me for quite a time, each time I read your letter there is a leap of my heart towards you in quintessential response.
I think your latest dream is symbolic of this wordless interchange of friendship. All the circumstances are significant of it. You dream that you wake up from sleep. Rapt away from the outer consciousness by sleep, you have become aware of your inner being and are acting in it. And what do you find? Right at your door appears "a just born child" which you recognise with your own soul's instinct as representing the "Psychic". Whose inmost being could have been thus figured - spontaneously drawn to your "veranda"? Who in the land of the living is closest to you and has the sense of you always intense and intimate in his heart and mind? And to be seen as "just born" is to carry the aspect in which you usually feel your dearest friend - the aspect so well pictured in a famous passage of Wordsworth:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
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Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Wordsworth's poem develops the idea that as we grow older the "Heaven" which lay "about us in our infancy" starts to dim and "shades of the prison-house begin to close" upon us but still something of "the vision splendid" lingers through boyhood and youth until
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.
By the by, 1 may remark that these lines as well as those linking the ending with the quoted passage remind me of the dawn-process in the opening canto of Savitri - how the Goddess of Dawn appeared with a promise of some unearthly lustre, still unrealised in our world, but gradually
The message ceased and waned the messenger,
Too mystic-real for space-tenancy
Her body of glory was expunged from heaven:
The rarity and wonder lived no more.
There was the common light of earthly day.
To return to my subject: the movement which Wordsworth envisages of the slow fading of the "vision splendid" in ordinary life is reversed in the life of Yoga in the Ashram. What Wordsworth took to be faded starts to come back. Under the touch of Sri Aurobindo and at the Mother's beckoning finger the forgotten Soul re-emerges, scintilla by scintilla, and through the years of our sadhana it gathers strength and at last arrives at the point of near-plenitude, which Wordsworth speaks of, when from its home in God it comes "trailing clouds of glory". Step by step, from manhood's obscurity a progression takes place to the youth and
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the boy's semi-lit state and finally to the babe's halo of heavenly memories. When this phase is reached we are fullblown disciples of Sri Aurobindo, true children of the Mother. So I am happy to have been found by you as "a just bom child". I hope the reverse movement I have traced of the Wordsworthian story really holds good for me and the babe you saw was not a pretty little pretender but one whose tiny untutored look contained a "secret splendour" and deserved Wordsworth's insightful apostrophe:
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;...
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day....
A Presence which is not to be put by....
Now let me consider the earlier dream recounted in the letter you wrote on the 40th anniversary of the day on which you "started from Calcutta for Pondicherry for the first time". Now, unlike that anonymous baby visiting you, you are visiting me in your own identifiable shape. I am delighted to learn that you, standing at my door, hear me singing a famous song of Tagore's, whose gist is: "Whatever comes to me, O Lord, even if it be unpleasant, is a boon from Thee." This gist echoes in general what I have put in that credo of mine, the poem "Triumph is All". Let me quote two stanzas from it:
O mine the smiling power to feel
A secret sun with blinded eyes,
And through a dreaming worship bear
As benediction wintry skies.
For ever in my heart I hear
A time-beat of eternal bliss.
White Omnipresence! where is fear?
The mouth of hell can be Thy kiss.
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Yes, my poem answers to Tagore's memorable faith, but there is a further shade in it beyond the religious approach which reads God's Will even in unpleasant events. This further shade is a direct recognition of the Divine's open or hidden hand everywhere by the soul's awakened intimacy with its Supreme Source. There is not only faith and a sweet resignation, convinced that an Ultimate Goodness is at the core of things and that all shall be well at the end. The basic difference lies in hearing within one's heart
Beyond religious trust, beyond even a meditative contact with the Unknown, the very immanence of the Divine is here a living fact. The Blissful Boundless Beloved, the "Beauty of ancient days who is yet ever new" - this is a reality in the deep heart where the soul exists only by the existence of the supernal One who is the All. In the act of being itself, the soul is perpetually aware of being a portion of the Master of the worlds, a child put forth from herself by the Infinite Mother. By such an experience, every adversity is not merely felt in a vague way as a blessing in disguise, a boon in its essence: it is known as a working by the Divine under the conditions of an evolving imperfect world to bring by however strange a path the soul nearer to its Master, its Mother. A direct development is seen to happen by a paradox of pain leading to a higher spiritual peak, a greater closeness to God.
I am intrigued by your finding me an adept in Tagorian Bengali. I suppose that in the subliminal realm we are acquainted with things which are outside our ken in normal life . By some sort of poetic empathy I must have entered Tagore's "plane" of consciousness, the Gandharva world of magical rhythms, and felt at home in his creative activity. In waking life my contact with Bangla bani is very limited. From hearing Nirod and some others intersperse their English with mane, my logical mind deduced that this word meant "I
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mean". By a leap of imagination I once thought I had discovered that the Bengali for the English "key-hole" was, most surprisingly, "ki-holo". Later, I was disappointed to learn that it only conveyed "What's happening?" The Bengali for a sneeze seemed to be - onomatopoeically -"hochchay" - though some people sought to disillusion me by equating it to the bare "Yes". I also learned some peculiarities when in the middle 'thirties I was teaching English to the famous Sarat whom I had dubbed "a domesticated fanatic" and who, in answer to my morning inquiry as to how he was, would say: "Somehow I am feeling quite all right." I gathered from my experience with him that no one-hundred-per-cent Bengali can pronounce the word "above" properly. Sarat made it either "abub" or "avuv". Similarly I heard of a strange phenomenon on the Pondi sea-shore: "big babes leaping!" Then there was the equally strange experience when the Mother had made me the first furniture manager. I had to remove a cot belonging to Barinda. I arranged with Jyotin to get everything ready for me. He told me to go to the house concerned and added the startling news: "Now the cot is on Barinda." I remonstrated: "You mean that Barinda is on the cot?" He firmly replied: "No, no. The cot is on Barinda." Puzzled I went to the house and what did I find? The cot was on the veranda!
Whatever be the tricks the Bengali language plays on me, I am deeply grateful to it for the majesty it has given to our Guru's name by transforming the rather colourless Sanskrit "Aravinda". How impressive and full-rhythmed is the Bengali version: "Aurobindo"!
After this linguistic digression I come back to your dream. Our holding each other's hands and looking at each other are a natural consequence of our warm friendship, especially as fellow-sadhaks. But what you did next is most unexpected although at the same time most touching in more than one sense. You say: "I felt an urge to touch with my forehead our clasped hands - and I did it." Surely I do not deserve so much reverence blended with affection. And I have taken
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care to let the touch of your forehead go not to my head but to my heart.
On the 2nd of this month you gave me the thrilling news that you were on the last lap of The Life Divine and you end the news by quoting the final phrase of this multi-visioned cosmos-sweeping book. The closing sentences are worth citing in full:
"Our evolution in the ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature."
These two sentences are a couple of insights spanning all time and linking convincingly the phases of a double movement which is at bottom one single activity in two gigantic steps: the evolution in the ignorance and the evolution in the Knowledge, the one with an embodied vital-mental complex half-lit by the hidden soul in it, the other with the soul come forward in this vital-mental embodiment and with the power of the Spirit above the mind at open play. Mark that Sri Aurobindo presents the first state of "half fulfilments" as leading "inevitably" to the second. There is an implicit logic at the back of the succession because the Divine is already in things and what we call nature is an immense whole in which our current sense of Nature reveals only a part. What is "still a Supernature" to us is not anything extraneous to the world-scheme: it is Nature in its "true power" - a power which is really everywhere but manifest and dynamic in entirety only in the inmost and topmost ranges of consciousness. This "true power" is implied in those lines in Sri Aurobindo's poem "Descent", where it is said to express itself in Mantric inspiration and revelation:
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Words that live not save upon Nature's summits.
It may interest you to know that when I took down from my shelf the American edition of The Life Divine, which I keep handy for quick reference, I found on the last page the date on which I had finished reading it over months of continued light and delight: 21.9.1951. Your date of reaching the grand finale is 2.9.1990. The month is the same and my day includes as its initial figure your 2.
Your idea of following up with a re-reading of Savitri is in tune with a common chord of composition-pattern in this work and the The Life Divine. Both the books have been planned on a cyclopean scale. Savitri has a mould equally massive and multiform as The Life Divine. The latter deals with every aspect of spiritual philosophy in prolific detail and is comprehensively illustrative of what Shelley has termed "a mind grown bright, gazing at many truths". In Savitri as in The Life Divine, "length", as Sri Aurobindo wrote to me, "is an indispensable condition for carrying out its purpose and everywhere there is this length...in every part, in every passage, in almost every canto or section of a canto.... It aims not at a minimum but at an exhaustive exposition of its world-vision or world-interpretation." As in The Life Divine, its method is "architectural" - "to give a large and even a vast, a complete interpretation, omitting nothing that is necessary, fundamental to the completeness." There is only one difference in the midst of the common extensive treatment. The Life Divine abounds in lengthy sentences, winding majestically on, unfolding idea after luminous idea in a closely concatenated form. Savitri is built of short sentences as a rule. It mainly dispenses with enjambment, the flow-over from line to line as mostly in Milton's blank verse. Each line here stands strongly by itself, though yet fitting harmoniously with other apparently independent lines, each seeming complete in its span of five feet. This is a technique
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difficult to sustain effectively unless the imagination is highly charged and carries in every brief part a subtle sense of its predecessor and successor even while standing revelatorily on its own.
I may add that both Savitri and The Life Divine need to be read audibly. All great literature is at the same time sculpture and music. And in these books there is not only artistic rhythm: there is also the wing-beat of the Mantra, the significant sound that lives in a modulated phrase as if it entered it - whether ideatively or imaginally - from a vast of wisdom above the human mind and a depth of exaltation beyond the human heart. Without the ear sensitively responding along with the attentively answering eye, the life-thrill of the superhuman planes from which the words come will not be sufficiently caught in our being. The Mantra, in order to make its impact in full, requires to be realised in its vibration no less than in its message. Perhaps you will wonder whether philosophy can be Mantric. All depends upon the source of it. In the Overmind, whence the Mantra hails, Truth and Beauty are one and it is Gods and Goddesses that covertly move in the steps of sentences like the one with which The Life Divine opens its procession of logical vision:
"The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thought and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, - for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality."
Now for a bit of closing personal touch out of our own present preoccupation. I am referring to a recent feeling of mine in the midst of our faltering attempts at "the Life Divine". In a letter written two days back to a friend in Bombay I had occasion to allude to the same spiritual
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perception. It is a sort of variation on the life-theme couched in that song of Tagore's and at greater application in my own poem "Triumph is All".
Of late I have been feeling as if the Mother's presence were not only above me and in front of me and within me but also behind me enfolding my body and carrying me onward according to her will. Of course now and again my own impulses and ideas seem to come in the way of this wide warm .wind of love and power supporting and urging me. I try my best to get my choices and my actions float on its quiet impetus. When I succeed, it is such a relief for hours and hours, if not days and days, to have no worry over good fortune or bad fortune, no care about right or wrong. Whatever this love and power at the back of me is able to do with me and through me brings the automatic assurance that all, no matter what the appearance, is invariably for the best. And there is a sense of happy rest in everything that happens, as well as a calm confidence that the Mother whose presence is behind is ever taking her child nearer and nearer to the Mother who is above and in front and within.
It is a little past midnight now. Let me hope to figure again in your sweet dreams.
(10.9.1990)
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12
I was delighted to get your poem' for my birthday, all the more because it brought a breath of England with its conjuration of flowers from Sussex hills and woods on the music of a language which is part of my inmost being. There is a slight touch of early Milton and a half-hint of Shakespeare in the verbal turn here and there, but both are taken up most felicitously into the quintessential You, and this taking up is all the richer because of that faint waft of the past, which I love, mingling with the air of the England your dear self carries into my heart. I have particularly in mind the phrases - remarkable in both image and rhythm - in lines 5-10:
A Birthday Bouquet
Dear Muse, companion of my dreaming hours.
Gather me violets huddled under hoods:
On Amal's birthday let us send him flowers,
Bluebells and daisy-chains from English woods.
Send to him snowdrops that the sun's cool kiss
Fathered in mossy glades before the spring;
A riot of poppies scarlet in the grass;
And every fragrance that the warm winds bring
From roses after rain - with clarion daffodils,
First in the van of summer, celebrate this day,
And golden buttercups from Sussex hills!
All these dispatch to Amal, that he may
Look down upon a Pondicherry street -
Yet see an English garden at his feet.
Sonia Dyne
The day was very well celebrated with Indian flowers blending in my sight with the memory of your lines.
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Now my eighty-sixth year has been completed. I expect I shall see at least my ninety-fourth year to find out the full drift of a letter Sri Aurobindo dated in such a style that 1928 read quite distinctly as 1998. If in these eight more years I can bring out the eighteen books still lying unpublished in my cupboard I shall have covered my literary life-work - provided I beware of writing any further books during that period and creating the necessity of living yet longer to see them through the press. But can I remain unproductive all that time - and how much further lease of life can I hope for beyond 1998? Actually I have no sense of how short or how long could be the period of my continuation on earth. Some people feel at a certain age that their life's work is done. I am referring, of course, not to people who feel fulfilled when their grandchildren are grown up or when they have amassed a good fortune for the future family to thrive upon or when their ambitious careers have been crowned with success, I am referring to those who are not of the common run, people who carry in their bones the drive of some great mission. Milton, for instance, who knew he had been born for a worthwhile poetic creation. 1 believe Dante too had to wait for the Divine Comedy to emerge. After this poem's music had come to rest with
I'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle
(The love that moves the sun and the other stars)
its author must have been quite resigned to end his life of unhappy exile far from his beloved Florence, just as after waking up one of his daughters at some odd hour of the night to take down the dictation of the lines -
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way -
the blind revolutionary Puritan, fallen on evil days and evil tongues in Restoration England, could not have cared much
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whether his own "solitary way" went further on or not. I have no intuition of having to wind up some Paradiso or Paradise Lost. But you are right in believing that on the literary side the Amal of Sri Aurobindo has reached his goal essentially in the considerable mass of his poetic expression. I can't be sufficiently grateful to you for making possible the publication of this mass in the near future. However, for two reasons I wouldn't feel my days quite rounded and ready to close when my volume sits proudly on the shelves of my Lady Bountiful.
One reason is that the literary life-force in me breaks out in many directions and finds satisfaction even in such a fantastic-seeming project as The Beginning of History for Israel. The other is that Sri Aurobindo, while giving a tremendous push to the writer in me, has yet so moulded my being that the main urge of my life is to be the disciple of his Integral Yoga and to go on and on in realising his immensity of light and his profundity of bliss in both inner and outer living -and these too not in one single mode but in a multitude of manners. Channelling the Aurobindonian inspiration in various lines of literary activity is surely my nature's bent, but still more is it its bent to let the Aurobindonian revelation stream forth through all the thousand and three movements of my being in thought and word and deed from hour to hour. My first preoccupation is always to answer in pulsing reality the questions: "Does the Supreme Master's presence suffuse every attitude of mine? Does the presence of the Divine Mother manifest itself in all my relationships with fellow-creatures?" Since the goals of the old spiritual paths are regarded as no more than stepping-stones in the Integral Yoga, the drive of a perpetual seeking in which God
is no fixed paradise
But truth beyond great truth
leaves the future grandly indeterminate for one and raises up in one the strange idea that one has to live for ever. It is not a
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question of clinging to life - something deeper, wiser, quieter than one's own heart seems to lead one onward and sees no discernible end. Should one speak of a sense of immortality on earth? That may hardly sound reasonable. Perhaps one can speak of what the Rigveda calls "the Immortal in the mortal" standing awake in one all the time? Possibly the feeling is present that one has lived innumerable past lives and is going to have life after future life on earth securely in the transforming hands of our Gurus. I can't tell. All I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a faraway manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now.
Enough of what Yeats, unable to look further than his nose and yet hurting it up, dubbed "Asiatic vague immensities". Let me attend to the fine letter you wrote to me just before flying to England.1 Your answers to the question how
1. My dear Amal,
We tried once to find a mutually satisfying form of words to describe what poetry is: do you remember? Now your last letter seems to challenge me to say how it is produced - sudden inspiration flowing effortlessly into song? The infinite capacity for taking pains? A little bit of both?
In a letter to a young man who had sent examples of his work, Walter Scott described poetry as a 'knack'. He didn't seem to set much store by it, either, and advised the aspiring poet to apply himself to a worthwhile profession! Perhaps it was a tactful way of telling the young man that he had no talent. On the other hand, to a writer like Waiter Scott, poetry may well have seemed to be no more than a 'knack' with words. I cart imagine Rudyard Kipling, for example, saying the same. Sri Aurobindo dismissed Kipling as a clever versifier, not a poet, and he may have dismissed Scott in the same way. Yet, few critics have attempted to make the distinction that Sri Aurobindo makes, and for the reading public in general there is no distinction to be made (between poetry and mere verse) that does not depend upon subject matter and style.
You and I both agree that poetry is "received by the thinking mind". It follows that whatever is simply a product of the thinking mind, however elegantly phrased and irrespective of its outward form, is not "real" poetry. Stated bluntly like that, the truth I am trying to express is greatly reduced. 1 know, I would not like to have to define what I mean by "thinking mind", or to state how poetry which after all is language, the very vehicle of thought - can be "received", as if it existed, unexpressed, apart from the language in which it is expressed. Yet I do believe this ..
I do not want to be prescriptive, and if I had never tried to write poetry myself i would not dare even to express an opinion. I am guided by my own
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poetry is produced are excellent. They are a "Yes" to several possibilities, as poetry comes in many ways: the central truth
experience and intuition. Once I asked a friend, a sculptor, how he was able to carve a head (a perfect likeness of the subject) out of a block of stone. He told me that he 'saw' the head, as if already existing within the block, waiting to be uncovered. He did not "create" it - it was there already in its final form - the process was one of gradual and patient discovery. This is how 1 see a poem - as pre-existent, waiting for the poet who will discover it. I do admit that the discovery may require a long labour... or it may not. The point at issue is that the process is one of discovery (although we call it creation because it seems to us that when we discover what is, we build). If we were not so tangled up in time, if our yearning for the future equalled our nostalgia for the past, surely we would see the process of artistic creation with different eyes.
I will admit that I do not believe in the necessity of hard labour. Something in me has always rejected the ancient biblical prophecy (or curse): "in the sweat of thy brow shall thou eal bread". For this was not said until Adam had been driven out of paradise, and therefore we infer a prior blessed state, natural to man as he was first made, in which he does not labour... Now in that blessed state - in that supramental state, one might say (looking forwards instead of backwards) - would there be a limbo-state between perception and perception perfectly expressed in language (the future poetry)... a limbo-state filled with hard labour?
I am not trying to say that labouring at a poem makes it less a product of Hopkins' "sweet fire". Often we have to wait and strain for the felicity that surprises us (we know it is not ours by right) and enchants us with "the rhythmic sense of hidden things".
For what, after all, is the object of all our "doing and undoing", as you, quoting Yeats, have put it in your letter? Isn't it to keep clear the channel by which inspiration entered? The inevitable word, when we find it, is transparent - the light behind shines through. When we reject a word, isn't it because it somehow blocks that channel? When Meredith wrote
"1 low slowly does the skein of time unwind"
he found an image that cannot be replaced by any other - one feels this, but it can't be explained. Do you think he laboured to find "skein of time" or did the image impose itself, so many years before physicists began to speak of space-time as a curve, before the discovery of the shape of the DNA molecule - (a skein seems to be one of nature's basic shapes) - did the image impose itself because it embodied a truth, and the channel was clear? If Meredith had pondered over his image, he may have "undone" it and substituted something more conventional. Often the thinking mind rejects inspiration, not recognising it for what it is.
Keeping the channel clear - that is labour enough: and slowing down the dance of "inspiration's lightning feet" because we cannot write fast enough! If we succeed, and "the great wordless thoughts" leave their impress, their au revoir on an image, on the rhythm of a phrase - I call that poetry! But who knows this better than you?
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is that it "comes" and is not made by the surface intelligence - "the thinking mind", as we call it. And, of course, this implies that a poem "pre-exists" and there are, as you say, "the great wordless thoughts", but these movements of the higher conceptions and perceptions represent, as another phrase of Sri Aurobindo's cited by you has it, "the rhythmic sense of hidden things". Not words as such but a meaningful rhythm which can be communicated in the form of words in any language has to be part of the original inspiration. To turn a phrase of Swinburne's to my use, I should speak of "very sound of very light". And this sound is both of particular significances and of overall suggestions. When caught in language, the inspiration is not only in individual words but also in their general order and in special combinations. Let me pick out the line you have quoted from Meredith:
How slowly does the skein of time unwind.
No doubt, what immediately strikes us is the word "skein" -though I am not sure whether your "curved" space-time of relativity physics and your "double helix" of the DNA molecule are quite relevant or invest "skein" with extra insight. Can we even say that these phenomena of macro-physics and microbiology have any "unwinding" shade in them? The basic insight of Meredith's metaphor simply is: "Hardly do events and circumstances yield their true meanings at once, and often the meanings are manifold: their tangle rarely grows clear all round in a brief while." "Skein" is indeed the mot juste for this truth, by its touch of concrete imagery no less than by its figurative connotation. But it acquires its full force only by being part of a rhythmic whole of sound to convey the sense. The opening foot - a spondee with long stressed vowels - reinforces its sense by its sound: the delay in the skein's unwinding is driven subtly home through the ear at the very first step of the poet's perception. Similarly, the final word "unwind", both by its utter proxi-
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mity to ''time'' and by its containing the same long accented i as that word, as well as by its standing where it does, becomes specially effective in a conclusive manner to suggest that the function indicated gets carried out. The total interconnected impression the line makes would be lost if the ensemble were reshuffled to something like:
The skein of time - how slowly it unwinds.
The skein of time - how slow is its unwinding.
The initial suspense, the delicate atmosphere of discovery, the rhythmic and verbal reflection of the meaning unfolded -all these are missing. Merely the metaphor of "skein", however apt an inspiration, will not create authentic poetry unless it is an organic element in an inspired order of significant words.
1 don't know whether Meredith got bis Une straight away or after trying out some such versions as I have offered for comparison. As for the "skein"-image, I don't think he laboured to find it. It must have imposed itself.
Your idea that a true poem "pre-exists" is quite correct in the sense that what flows through the poet's pen is something that has hailed from beyond his scribal consciousness. He has found it, not put it together. But all poems cannot be said to pre-exist in the very form they take through that consciousness. There are works which are of one consistent shining tissue: e.g., Shelley's "Skylark". But some poems seem to vary in the texture of their parts. All the parts may be of equal artistic excellence and yet they may derive from different "planes" and cohere only in what I may term a subtle aura just beyond the poet's receptive mind. He may have got stuck at some point and when he resumed writing, though the theme was not changed, the style of expression was from another "plane" than the one he had started with. Then the resultant whole cannot be considered to pre-exist in its entirety from the start. It is a fusion of disparate pre-
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existences - elements drawn from more than one source of creation to serve a single thematic purpose. Here is no question of varying intensities of expression: everything is equally intense, but the intensities are not all of the same mode of revelation. Let me give you an example
Evanescence
Where lie the past noon-lilies
And vesper-violets gone?
Into what strange invisible deep
Fall out of time the roses of each dawn?
They draw for us a dream-way
To ecstasies unhoured,
Where all earth's form-hues flicker and drop,
By some great wind of mystery overpowered.
In this example what Sri Aurobindo has designated as the "overhead" plane of Intuition is active with its sudden disclosures which are subtle yet go straight into our minds and prove completely convincing. Yes, there is only one plane at work but it operates in two distinct dimensions. If it had continued in one dimension throughout, the poem would have been of a piece and the whole said to have a pre-existence. Evidently the last two lines bring a different turn of sight - a vision less vivid and direct, a more spread-out thought-touched though still light-swept eye is at play. It is as if the poet could not sustain the "occult" or "magic" vein, so enchantingly profound, and opened himself to a region more familiar to him: the Illumined Mind of Sri Aurobindo's overhead series. The inspiration from the Intuition got latched on to this more •familiar, even if intrinsically rare, region and brought forth a pure intuitivised snatch from it, no less fine as sheer spiritual poetry than the charmed outbreak from the in-world he had tapped earlier, but constituting a poetic pre-existence different from the one
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which that in-world had yielded in the six opening lines.
I am sure your sensitive aesthetic ear will understand why, while granting poetic pre-existence, I am led to a less simple notion of it than would occur to one at first blush.
My own style of composition is a mixture of swift and slow - precipitation and pause - except in the poems of The Adventure of the Apocalypse where for three exultant months there was almost a constant leaping out of phrase after flashing phrase. There was also a start-to-finish movement, whereas ordinarily I may begin anywhere, occasionally in the middle of a poem and sometimes even at the end of it, and work my way to revelatory significances before or after! A seed of light, as it were, falls into my mind with the thrill of a basic suggestion calling to be unravelled in many shades which yet are a unity like a swirl of various planets with a single sun at its centre. The perfectionist critic in me is never at rest until he can have the sense of a radiant whole.
(27.11.1990)
By now you must have received my letter of the 27th November, As it was long overdue in reply to yours of September 28th, written on the eve of your flight to England for over a month, I was in a hurry to post it. So, after my reflections apropos of my completing 86 years on 25 November, I went on to discuss the questions you had raised about poetry. In doing this I omitted a very important occurrence connected with my statement: "All I know at this instant is that an all-pervading peace appears, in a far-away manner, to hold me at its core and that I am caught, however faintly, in some eternal Now."
As soon as I had written these words the peace which I had spoken of came forward from the back of my consciousness, made the centre which it had in my little self a spreading glow, at once intense and soothing, what I can only call an omnipotent softness. It permeated my whole being, my entire body and I was immediately a new person.
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The newness had a particular relevance as well as a general one. I have dwelt on both in a couple of letters to friends. I wish to repeat my account to you who most deserve to have it since you were the direct occasion of my experience.
My birthday had passed as usual with several fellow-Ashramites dropping in with their warm smiling faces. There was an atmosphere of happiness. But in one respect this birthday was a little different from my past ones. It had fallen in the midst of a period of indisposition - a fortnight during which I had a persistent low fever accompanied by a constant unease in the stomach. For more than two days the stomach refused to let any food in. I was reminded of the time - 17 years earlier - when I had gone to Bombay for my first cataract-removal. Some time after the operation I contracted a fever and a great malaise in the stomach as if an ogre had been sitting there and refusing all nourishment. My nephew who was a doctor in that hospital swept me out of the place and took me home. The illness went on for more than a week. Medicines made it worse. During that period a passive prayer to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother went on - passive because there was just a turn towards them with no explicit call for intervention. When conditions looked as though there were a hidden form of typhoid at work, suddenly one evening, around 8 p.m., 1 saw with my closed eyes a fist come down with great force behind me on the right side of my body and at once the ogre was pushed out of my stomach and the fever vanished. The same night I had a dream of trie Mother walking on her roof-terrace and 1 myself standing in the street below. A tremendous wave of emotion went up to her from me - such as I have never known at any time in my waking hours. During my latest illness I had made a definite appeal to our Gurus to rid me of the fever and the stomach-upset. But nothing took place until the day I wrote to you. Then with that momentous sentence the fever and the general discomfort in the body were just washed away. I suspended my typing for a minute or two, lost in that
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glowing softness of utter tranquillity in which I was plunged literally from head to foot. Then I returned to my typewriter.
The sense of "some eternal Now" stayed outward for a few hours, delicate and yet most Concretely invasive - then gradually receded into the background without disappearing. The work it did directly in the body is a settled thing: I am cured and healthy.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of one of the most significant days in the Ashram's history: December 5, 1950, when Sri Aurobindo left his body. The message distributed this morning is a prayer by the Mother:
"Grant that we may identify ourselves with Your Eternal Consciousness so that we may know truly what Immortality
is."
I feel that in a remote and passing way what the Mother wants us to have was borne into me by a sudden breath of her grace on the fateful November 27.
(5.12.1990)
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13
I am going on as usual. The peace is there and the aspiration continues, but a big breakthrough has to come. When I look deep within myself, I seem to feel a thorough self-giving in general to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, but evidently whatever is there is not fully translated into the outer being with its remnants of the Old Adam though they are not specially lingering on the look-out for any old (or even young) Eve. I hope it won't take too long for the ordinary consciousness to kindle completely with the rose-and-white glow of the innermost profundity and the blue-silver-gold splendour of the overarching infinite. Will I have enough time to live altogether up to the futurist vision Sri Aurobindo had in choosing for me my Ashram name "Amal Kiran", meaning according to him "The Clear Ray"? The adjective separated from the noun may not be very difficult to exemplify in life: I could be sufficiently clear-headed. But for the day-to-day Me of the clear head to have a constant illumination which goes beyond the surface of things, a ray from behind and from above has to be at work. At all hours I have to be radiant-hearted on the one hand and, on the other, lustrously super-conscious. Then the day-to-day will be integrally in touch with the permanent. No doubt, the process is on towards a total harmony of the apparent and the passing with the immanent-immortal and the transcendent-eternal. But oh it is so slow! I pray that before this body falls, the Ever-unfalling who is deep down and high up may sojourn a la Omar Khayyam
Here in this battered caravanserai
Whose portals are alternate night and day.
(10.10.1990)
I am a little late in replying, as I often am. The thought of my
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habitual guilt was the first one this morning after the habitual feeling of a heart wanting to be pure of every desire except the ache for the Divine Beloved. On getting out of bed 1 reread your letter and was struck by two points.
First, your resolve "not to give a chance to any so-called great person" to become your "Guru". Once we are dedicated to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who were never anxious to have disciples, how can we share our souls with anyone who claims spiritual eminence and is eager to have people falling at his feet? I remember my friend Purani telling me an incident of early days. Sri Aurobindo was standing at the door of his room while Purani was leaving. The disciple went down on his knees to make obeisance to Sri Aurobindo's feet. After a few seconds he lifted his head and looked up. There was nobody standing any more. Purani told me with a laugh:"Strange Guru indeed who runs away like that!"
You have also hit the mark when you declare: "I am quite a child but the Divine Mother's child. That is enough for me. I have no need of fame and name." This shows at the same time a natural humility, a proper sense of what is truly of worth in one and a detachment from common ambition. Having been accepted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother should tend to give one an all-sufficing happiness. But the desire for fame, the yearning for name are not easy temptations to overcome if one has some talent beyond the ordinary. Rarely do specially gifted people act like Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who always tried to keep themselves in the background. Once the Mother, after reading an article of mine on her, published in the Bombay paper The Sunday Standard of February 17, 1952, told me: "When I read anything written on me in public, all my hair stands up! Speak about the aim of the Integral Yoga, the method of doing it, but I don't like my personality to be pushed forward. Not that I have any false modesty. I know where 1 have come from, but the thing of value for the world is our teaching. There may even be an unsympathetic response if
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the teaching is mixed up too much with us as persons." After a moment she added: "Keeping our persons back may be good practical policy too. Especially as regards the Western world it is better to speak of the Spiritual Truth impersonally."
I have gone through some tests of "fame and name" in my early life - having managed to distinguish myself during school and college days. I can't say I always came out successfully through the tests. But after joining the Ashram I spent many years during which all I cared for in connection with my writings was that they should pass under Sri Aurobindo's eyes and get acceptance or rejection. His comment and nothing else decided for me the worth of my prose or poetry. Once in the 'thirties I even set aside a friend's offer to publish all the poems I had so far written - set it aside because the collected works of my Guru had not yet come out. Later on, when books on various subjects from my pen accumulated I used to speculate how they could get published. Though I was never a pusher, I did feel it would be good if I could come out in print. However, one day, standing before the whole array of my numerous typescripts, kept in separate files, I suddenly became aware of a great wave of what I can only describe as a self-swallowing quietude of aloofness. In a movement simultaneously of humility and transcendence the words came out of my mouth: "It doesn't matter if none of these books get published!" That was a moment of immense relief - of profound freedom.
Many books of mine have seen the light since then - in fact 23 in all — but essentially with an impersonal attitude behind them. Today 18 books still remain unpublished. In relation to them, a few nights back I passed through what I consider one of the most important experiences of my Ashram life. It happened during sleep. I had a dream in which I found that the cupboard in which all my typescripts had been stored was quite empty! A ghastly surprise was the first reaction to their disappearance. Then something within
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me said: "Remember you have been doing Yoga. Are you or are you not taking this tragedy with perfect equanimity? It is impossible for you to rewrite these books. Can you rise above the tremendous void in front of you?" My spontaneous answer was "Yes." The next moment I woke up, a little stunned but deeply thankful to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that even in the dream-state, face to face with an irreparable misfortune, my chief concern could be whether I was doing their Yoga properly.
If we may put together little things with great, I may recount a conversation with the Mother long ago. She used to be a very fine painter. Referring to her own work, she told me: "Some of my best paintings were done in Japan. But most of them are lost." I blurted out: "Is this not a great loss? What have you done about it?" With a calm smile she said: "Don't you know that we live in eternity?" As if from a sleep I had woken up, I looked into her eyes and murmured: "Of course, of course." It must be this occasion that sowed the seed of whatever distant sense I may have caught of the plenary Beyond, the Timelessness that is the All. A shadow of that eternal Fullness must have got projected in both the instances connected with my unpublished writings.
(20.10.1990)
I am glad that you have the ideal of spiritual development and realise at the age of fifty that time is running out. If your acute sense of having wasted half a century leads you to open more and more to Sri Aurobindo's Godward-guiding light and the Mother's life-divinising force, the past will not strike you as just a wilderness of vain hours but as a meandering preparation for the straight Yogic path that lies ahead. Feel increasingly a standing back in wide detachment from the crisscross of reactions in your outer being - reactions that are sensitive personal responses to hurting touches from the world or else self-indulgent answers to tempting stimuli from it. With such a background of peaceful imper-
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sonality at all times, let your foreground life be a constant uplifting of all these touches and stimuli to the subtle presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that is always with you as at once a soothing supporter by your side and a forward-calling commander in front.
As for the disorders and misfires you find all around us today, don't allow them to trouble you overmuch. The best we can do is to appeal to our Gurus to hasten the advent of the Golden Age they have visioned in spite of being clearly conscious of the misery and madness of the world into which they had descended. If within our little individual world we try to live with the deep sense of them at secret work we shall have done our bit.
I was rather tickled by your final flourish: "Yours divinely, T. Prasad." What made you choose this mode of closing the letter? There must be something in your mind which led you to such an extraordinary gesture. From the purely literary viewpoint, "divinely" can prove to be the mot juste by getting followed by your surname "Prasad", a term which in India signifies something touched by or blessed by the Divine and taken as a gift from Him by human beings! But I don't think you intended this witticism.1
(25.12.1990)
The anecdotes you recount about your mother show clearly how spiritual help can come and change the whole aspect of a situation. But, whether we are helped or not in the way we
1. The writer's own explanation makes two attractive points. The first is that he is related to me by a divine dispensation - hence he is "divinely" related. He writes: "There is no other witticism on my part." The second point emerges when he adds: "Incidentally, let me tell you what I have been informed. When I was born, my grandmother was returning from her pilgrimage to Dwaraka, Krishna's birthplace. Before reaching our house she received the news. Immediately she exclaimed: Thakur has come to our house!' Thakur' means the Divine, and this word gives the initial in my name: T. Prasad'. Kindly wish that this name Thakur Prasad' may be realised in my life integrally by the Blessings of the Lord ."
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may expect, we must never lose faith in the Divine Power. Once we put ourselves in its hands, whatever happens is turned by it to our soul's good. Furthermore, the Divine's aim with us is to make our souls progress. If this progress is at times best brought about by what we may call unfavourable circumstances, the Divine's presence can very well be in them. All these are subtleties the believer has to bear in mind. But, of course, they have their truth provided our faith and trust in God and our adherence to Him with our inmost being are genuinely there. In any case, remembrance of Him, self-offering to Him, prayer to Him not only that His Will may be done but also that our wills may be guided by Him -these are the main points for a sincere sadhak.
(27.12.1990)
Your recent letter has made me sad. You ask me not to worry, but how can I not worry when your health is poor again and again and you are faced with the inconvenience of changing houses? Every day I invoke the Mother at the Samadhi to keep you well and protect you from all harm. I am sure her grace is with you. The greatest boon we can have from her is an inner openness to her and Sri Aurobindo, an openness which grows wider and deeper from moment to moment until finally a supreme experience comes in which at the same time there is an ineffable unmoving oneness with the Divine and an ever eloquent devotion, a ceaselessly appealing worship, a cry from the inmost heart: "I am yours, unite my will with your Will, guide me in everything, give me insight and compassion in my dealings with your children, and through all phases of life let a glowing laughing love be at play between us!"
(18.1.1991)
You are surprised at my saying that all of us are co-travellers towards what somewhere in each of us is a journey's end
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that has already been reached. Let me try to elucidate this cryptic-seeming statement.
When a disciple is accepted by the Mother she does two things. First, she builds a bridge between our outer self and our true being, the real soul of us and starts a traffic from the one to the other and establishes a future in which the erring human is seen as radiantly arriving at his angelic counterpart. However distant that future may be, it is firmly fixed by the Guru's hand outstretched with a touch of light to bless our dull-headed grope for God. The second thing the Mother does is an emanation of herself to go with us as a subtle companion to our thoughts and feelings, our words and actions, along the meander of our lives. This companion is meant to answer our cries for help and guide us through whatever may happen - the pull of pleasure or the push of pain - towards that "Immortal in the mortal" whom the Rigvedic Rishis sought to awake in us with their revelatory mantras and whose realisation by us one day or another is always kept in clear view by that emanation as if this truth of tomorrow were actually a fact of our own past which we are urged to remember.
(22.8.1990)
What has happened, obliging you to stay at home, is making you apparently stand still, but paradoxically it has pushed you farther on the great Path by bringing about a stillness within no less than without. Within, you are not standing still but becoming, as it were, a serenity rapidly moving inward and upward by a bit of spontaneous contact with that miraculous aspect of the Supreme Spirit:
This miraculous aspect is hinted at by you in the image of the "Charioteer". You have written: "There is now more fun in various battles to follow, for I hope that more and more I
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will be aware who my Charioteer is." I catch a hint also in the expression: "a different kind of quiet joy." A joy that is quiet is one that does not agitate to move on its own: its quietness lies in giving itself into the hands of a Wisdom at once vast and warm and letting it carry the smiling smallness that we now are to realms beyond our ability to reach. No longer are we at the reins of life: a masked being is holding them and governing the red horse of reality and the white horse of the ideal and bearing us along to what he sees as our destiny. Soon the Charioteer will sweep away his mask and we shall see the radiance that is his face. This face will be like a mirror held before us. We shall wonder how our own face could be so flawless and how this perfection could be at the same time so infinitely distant and so intimately near. Suddenly the knowledge will take shape in our dazzled darkness that the ultimate truth is an ever-beautiful Other whom the heart in us needs to worship day after day and the Ever-blissful Self of our self in whom our mind can repose eternally. But before this truth comes alive and fulfils the dream we already have of it we must feel intensely that we do not career forth by our individual initiative: the fact must drive home to us that in "quiet joy" we are being driven by Divine Grace away from a false foreign country to our real Home which was long hidden from us. In short, we must have more and more the sense which is growing in you of our sadhana being led forward by Sri Aurobindo's Light and the Mother's Love rather than by our feverish effort to be a disciple of that Light and our conscious attempt to be a child of that Love. Spontaneously we must find our lives put happily in their guiding hands.
P.S. Your latest letter, handed to me at the Samadhi, has one outstanding burst of felicitous originality: "Why the hell does the inner being continue to be inner still?" You have summed up there, most poignantly, most wittily, the first call of the Aurobindonian Yoga upon us - the "psychic transformation" by which the inner being is no longer something to which we have to go, leaving the outer to its
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own devices, but a flame and a fragrance of God which has swept into our very surface and pervaded each movement of our external life. This transformation may seem just the initial definitive step of the Integral Yoga, but actually it is one that will prove to be the final basis of the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's work in the world. For the Supermind cannot be established on earth except through a soul-suffused body. Short of such a body, the transcendent glories will merely overhang the earth or at best surround it but never become luminous flesh and rapturous blood.
(5.9.1990)
All the news I get about you is good. I am told you have planned to be up and about in a few days. But I agreed with your messenger that you should not be rash. I added that this was the considered advice of a rash man - that is, of one who had learned (for others) the bitter consequences of rashness.
I have not much to pass on to you today - except a short reflection bom of my daily observation of flowers on my way to the Samadhi from the Ashram gate. Here it is:
"Who says there is no perfection on earth? Look at a fullblown sunflower: a poise of twelve petals publishing themseLves around a quiet centre - colour intense, shape clear-cut emerging from that small shadowed source - no flaw anywhere - some archetype visible, some supreme beauty symbolled out - but oh how brief-lived! Soon a slight sagging, a bit of curling up, and in no time the failure of a faultless flower. That is the whole tragedy of living things in our world: a burst of perfection yet no sustainment of splendour. How are we to bring permanence to the marvels life is capable of?
"So far there has been only one way. Art catches up the passing into the perennial - at least it makes the fleeting wonder persist through the ages. But here life has found outside itself the solace for its own transience - an immor-
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tality without the bliss of breath. When will the artist find the secret of making his very being a lasting work of art? Surely one who could build the Taj Mahal or paint Ajanta or sculpt the Pieta or pen the Divine Comedy has projected immortality from some living core of it within him. Have not the Vedic seers spoken of the Immortal in the mortal? But cannot that hidden godhead render his own embodiment godlike besides bodying it forth from himself by the wizardry of his creative hand? This is the challenge Sri Aurobindo has set us, and with his Truth-Consciousness he has given us the means to start towards meeting it by realising first
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."
(17.9.1990)
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14
You have asked me: "Is it wrong to tell one's yogic experiences to an intimate friend?" My answer is: 'True intimacy means constant thought by friends of each other's welfare both outward and inward, an identification by one with the other's triumphs as- well as troubles - a hand immediately goes forth either to help or to felicitate and just as there is a spontaneous sharing of pain an automatic participation in joy takes place. Not a single twinge of envy at one's companion's good fortune occurs. It is because of jealous reactions that it is advisable not to share one's precious experiences with people. Through the envious eye of the hearer the hostile forces attempt to snatch away the benefits of our self-deepenings. Not many realise that our goal here is the Divine Mother's victory. And if she is victorious anywhere she is potentially victorious everywhere. For the human stuff, which she deals with and works at to transform, is the same in all of us and if she has succeeded in touching it to glory in one place an opening has been made through which her light can reach every place. Among true friends the promise of the pervasiveness of the Divine Action is not difficult to perceive. A beautiful experience of one is a matter for rejoicing by the other: the jealous look is never cast. So it is perfectly right to share with an intimate friend one's happy uplifting experiences."
I like the way you have put your morning experience: "A thin layer of darkness still enveloped the sky. One could hear a faint footfall of light in the eastern horizon. A stillness and quietude prevailed all around. I was in my deck-chair looking at the sky. Today one need not meditate. Meditation descends of its own." My" mind goes back to the glorious morning when first Sri Aurobindo showed me his supreme grace by beginning to disclose to me in private his slowly progressing and repeatedly revised masterpiece - the epic Savitri. The morning was of October 25,1936. And part of the
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passage, with which the poem as it stood at that time opened, ran:
The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along the moment's fading brink
Fixed with gold pane and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
The last line points me to your phrases: "Today one need not meditate. Meditation descends of its own." For, when there is an opening to the mystery behind the gate of one's aspiring dreams the divine Presence breathes out, as it were, from its golden inwardness and then the very air one inhales is meditation. In my passage I find also a personalising suggestion in the words "gesture", "touch", "hand", which would prepare for what you have termed "a faint footfall of light". And actually Sri Aurobindo, a litle later, brings in the Dawn-Goddess's footfall:
Once more a tread perturbed the vacant Vasts...
Earth felt the Imperishable's passage close:
The waking ear of Nature heard her steps...
All that you have written is well-inspired and I can intuit our Master emerging from the night's vagueness and enfolding his disciple's mind and heart with a reminiscence of the poem the disciple has deeply loved. Whether in moments when the meditation comes of itself or in those when one sets one's being in accord with the call of sadhana, the Master is ever with you. On November 8 you will feel him lifting you bodily, so to speak, and bearing you across
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"mystery's verge". I say "bodily" because this day commemorates your ever-existing soul's new embodiment. All the more emphasis I put on the corporeal fact because the Master himself brought his own eternity and infinity to a focus of flesh in our day and met the corporeal fact of us on the level of the human. Our body has a great importance and significance because of this earthly descent of Grace and we should do our best to let it be charged with the inner light in whatever measure we can reflect the visible and tangible phenomenon of divinity we have called Sri Aurobindo:
All heaven's secrecy lit to one face.
Yes, with his suffusion of physical form with the presence of Godliness, he has set us an example of divinising the most outward life - life in which the body has to be the transmitter of the illumined soul. Do you remember that ringing pronouncement of Sri Aurobindo's: "I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco"? And what is the farce of long standing which he has refused to accept? He has explained it: "a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the law of the external nature." Perhaps the most striking illustration of Sri Aurobindo's meaning is an anecdote the Mother has told somewhere. There was a man who had a great capacity of remaining in meditation. He could be absorbed for hours in an inner state which he felt to be wonderful. Once, while he was enjoying his trance, someone knocked at his door - and quite hard, too. The samadhi-expert got up from his chair, rushed to the door and throwing it open shouted: "You damned fool, how dare you come at this time? Don't you know I am with God?" The poor intruder was overwhelmed by that thunder out of heaven and stole away. The Mother's comment was: "This kind of meditation is worth nothing."
The outer personality with its petty and egoistic habits of thought, feeling and action has to be irradiated if the Aurobindonian Yoga is to be truly done. The consecration of
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each movement of our conscious embodied life to the Divine Mother is demanded. There is that command by Sri Aurobindo: "Love the Mother. Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." From the Mother deep within us to the Mother who is everywhere and within everyone our life has to move, guided by - in Sri Aurobindo's terminology - our "psychic being" and our "spiritual self". Out of a wide tranquillity beyond "time's unrest" a consciousness dedicated to Sri Aurobindo has to concentrate and channel itself to the outer world through that in-gathered profundity of shining sweetness and smiling strength which is our inmost heart, our true soul, spontaneously a child of the Divine Mother. When all thought, all word, all deed issue from that circumambient peace and that centre of luminous power into a world of body dealing with body, "the old fiasco" will begin to disappear,
I cannot wish you a happier birthday than one in which that body of yours which Sri Aurobindo has blessed and the Mother has caressed will help more and more the Golden Age visioned by our Gurus to gleam forth.
(7.11.1990)
Of late there has been a strange sense of far-away-ness. Maybe something in me has withdrawn more from the usual run of life; time seems so short for the great goal I have set myself and I am a little impatient; so it is possible the sense I speak of is a result of my present attitude. Not that my love for you has diminished by the slightest, but it is as if I were sending it to you from some spot on the moon rather than from Pondicherry. Perhaps the more correct way of putting things would be that I am myself in two places - one part on earth and one in the midst of a lunar landscape of changeless dream. But the dream is with open eyes and they still blend the pull of the inward with the call of the distant drama of terrestrial movement, in which something in me continues
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the hope to play a significant and helpful role.
(5.5.1985)
The account of your travel and your meetings with various people is thought-provoking. What did the wife of Krishna-murty's personal physician have to say about her husband's famous patient? Is she one of the bewildered "illuminati" trying to practise K's gospel of getting beyond the detailed clinging "time-consciousness" into some grooveless interiority? I may remark that such a gospel is not absent from Sri Aurobindo's teaching. Very clearly he has visioned
The superconscient realms of motionless peace .
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.1
But Sri Aurobindo does not end there. His revelation has another aspect:
Timeless domains of joy and absolute power
Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;
The ways that lead to endless happiness
Ran like dream-smiles through meditating vasts:
Disclosed stood up in a gold moment's blaze
White sun-steppes in the pathless Infinite.2
In Sri Aurobindo's teaching there is something which can give meaning to the multifarious movement of time and can change it to an evolving projection of the many-ness which is secretly present in an archetypal form in the One whom the Mandukya Upanishad sees to be "without a second". We must not forget that this Upanishad terms the full Reality fourfold and the deepest of the three other statuses, the status which opens into the fourth, is designated "the womb .
1.Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, 1972 Ed., pp. 35-36.
2.Ibid., pp. 39-40.
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of Brahman". Without abrogating the ultimacy of the unity it is possible in spiritual experience to find this unity endlessly creative without losing its unitary essence. If you will excuse the pun, I may say that in the One "without a second" not only many a second but also many a minute and hour and day and year are a haloed hiddenness - missed by those who try to catch a shadow of the exclusive systems of Buddha and Shankara. These systems had a utility in the past and the core of them cannot be neglected even now. Sri Aurobindo himself started with an overwhelming experience of Nirvana or Silent Brahman. But he had other realisations after it which were just as authentic. They formed with it a greater whole which gave at once an absolute freedom from the time-consciousness and an absolute source of fulfilling the long labour of the earth's ages.
(31.1.1986)
What has happened is opening up yourself to your own depths and, as a result, revealing the Mother's presence within you more and more. The assurance that has come to you from her has now an intenser tone which is bound to leave a lasting reverberation not only in your mind and heart but also in what Sri Aurobindo would call your "nerves of sensation". I can feel them vibrating all through your two letters. When the period of pain is gone, the vibration will not be so marked in its frequency but a steady movement will continue. It will form a kind of settled music in your most outer consciousness, a keen yet controlled response of this consciousness to the inner Mother in her act of emerging increasingly into the surface of your being and there radiating forth from her child in you to all her children outside you. Not that so far such a thing has never happened. But I think there was a self-awareness during it which made a mixture of your own individuality with the Divine - a very pleasant mixture, no doubt, since you the individual are a very pleasant fellow, but now a certain transparency will be
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there due to a self-forgetfulness, so that the Divine's radiation through you will have a sweeter and stronger spontaneity. What I call "self-forgetfulness" may be explained by your own statement that now your opening to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo is "ever-growing" from all the parts of your being.
You have written of my helping you. My prayer has been fervent in two directions. One is for getting you out of the present pain and inconvenience as quickly as possible. The other is for making the quick passage as fully as possible a channel for the Divine's purpose shining out through the accident - or rather for the accident turning into "a forced march" of the innermost into the outermost by a sustained cry on your part to the Divine to reach out to you across the abnormal circumstances that have caught you up in their whirl.
(28.8.1990)
Your account of how your saffron robe and cap carried you triumphantly everywhere in the USA was very enjoyable. It shows that the Americans are sensitive to spiritual symbols and are eager to get in touch with the truth behind them. They must also be perceptive of people's beings behind their physiognomies and appearances. For the USA has had quite an abundance of fellows claiming to represent Indian wisdom but each of whom my Associate Editor and I used to dub "Swami Bogusananda". I wish you had held the seminar the chap in Atlantic City wanted to attend. Perhaps if I had been in that city during your seminar I would have been hard pressed to decide whether to visit the Casinos for which it is famed or listen to my enlightened friend holding forth on the rapturous risks of the soul in this world which Sri Aurobindo has called
The wager wonderful, the game divine.
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I recollect also a sentence in The Life Divine or in The Synthesis of Yoga about how "the Purusha in a wager with himself" undertook the adventure, the perilous task of creating the stark opposite of everything divine and then starting to manifest his true reality from the inconscient. Vivekananda spoke of his God the poor, the miserable, the persecuted. I am inclined to speak of my God the gambler. And I think every mystic in quest of Him is himself one about whom the contented of the world, the observers of limit and measure cry out as in Sri Aurobindo's "Ahana":
Who is the nomad then? who is the seeker, the gambler
risking .
All for a dream in a dream, the old and the sure and the
stable
Flung as a stake for a prize that was never yet laid on the
table?3
Indeed I am glad of my God the gambler, for more than most people, even those who with their mystical bent know what Sri Aurobindo further says in the same poem -
All is a wager and danger, all is a chase and a battle -4
I am a queer case for whoever hopes to defy the warning of the worldly-wise:
All things created are made by their borders, sketched out
and coded;
Vain is the passion to divinise manhood, humanise
godhead.5
If Sri Aurobindo did not exemplify a gambling Avatarhood, would he have ever accepted the hazard of a case like me,
3.Collected Poems, 1972 Ed., p. 529.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid.
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such a dangerous complexity of personalities, each with its own demand to be fulfilled - including one that loved to indulge literally in various games of chance with real money involved?
Before I came to Pondicherry at the end of 1927 I knew a theosophist named Venkatachalam, an art-critic by profession. When he happened to know of my spiritual search he told me: "Nobody except Sri Aurobindo will satisfy so complex a person as you." Strange words issuing from a theosophist with a mind haunted by those "masters"who control everything in the universe, leaving no room for anyone like Sri Aurobindo to have a significant role anywhere. But this theosophist had been to Pondicherry in the days before the Ashram was formed and had met Sri Aurobindo and he could not help reporting to me: "Sri Aurobindo lives in the cosmic consciousness." I came to Pondicherry swept up on a wave which seemed irresistible. Sober thinking would never have brought me here. I once asked the Mother: "Will the Supermind, when it descends, be able to transform us in spite of ourselves?" She laughed and said: "I should think so!" I exclaimed: "Then there is hope for me!" My situation has only one saving grace. Somehow from the very start I, who had the reputation of being a brainy sort, told the Mother to open me up in the heart. Even on the last occasion I met her - on my birthday before the time she retired completely - my last words were: "Put your hand here (indicating the middle of my chest) and open me up." She put her hand there and, somehow sensing the heart, said: "It is beating very fast." I answered: "Yes, for I am very impatient now," She gave me one of her unforgettable smiles.
Luckily a radical beginning was made in the first few months of my stay in the Ashram - some time in mid-1928. I used to feel a pain in my chest every time I sat to meditate. I complained about it to the Mother. She remarked: "Don't worry. I know what it is. It will go." And go it did one day when I felt as if a wall had suddenly crumbled down in my
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chest and a marvellous depth disclosed the fire and fragrance of an ineffable felicity whose very stuff was an incessant spontaneous sense of the Eternal Beloved. The depth has not remained open in that extreme fashion always. But some experience of it has persisted through the years and now and again there has been its outburst. All complexities, all conflicts of the various selves in one, find their point of resolution, their world-forgetting rest, in that 'Immortal in the mortal" (to use the Vedic phrase about the Fire-God Agni dwelling within us).
I may add that this In-dweller, building up divinity in our nature, has also been the safeguard of the gambler Amal. In the midst of the thousand dangers - the pull in diverse tempting directions - to which I am exposed, here is an intuitive guide - not with open-eyed knowledge as in the hard-to-reach planes above the mind but with a truth-feeling in secret continuity with the impulsions of our vaguely searching emotional self. Here the wagering wanderer finds a centre of repose where the sense of a certainty waiting to be discovered is the bright allure to his bid for a winning bet in this "beautiful and perilous world", as Sri Aurobindo has called the field of the Supreme Purusha staking all to win all.
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15
Quite a long life has been mine. For us in the Ashram length of living has value only inasmuch as it measures out a nearer and nearer approach to the Light of our Gurus. We are - in the depths of our beings - always at the Great Goal, but our surfaces have to trace in time and space a running golden reflection of that eternal Truth. When I look back I feel ashamed of so many opportunities missed, so many fallings-away. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never encouraged the backward gaze and the regrettings and sighings. I can hear them saying: "Turn your ear to the flute of the future. Its melodies are endless. Waste no hours on airs that have faded, wishing them otherwise. There is no real fading if you feel a fullness awaiting you in the days to come. Get caught up in its call and let the years beyond your 86 move like a Beethoven Symphony mounting" to its grand finale."
(23.11.1990)
If one is really under the spell of what is called "black magic", one would feel some kind of indefinable malaise. But all such malaise is not necessarily a sign of being under black-magic influence. I think the best thing is not to have the impression of any influence of this kind. To be obsessed with the idea of it may prove harmful even if there is no black magic done. For, the mentality which lives under that obsession may put itself in touch with the low occult plane whose forces may themselves act as black magicians. Keep your mind free from fear. After all, real black magic is rare.
As a support to keeping the mind free from fear, I would advise you to repeat the mantra: Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama ("Sri Aurobindo is my refuge"). It is a master-mantra of protection, given by the Mother herself. One who is not an Aurobindonian may be advised to take the name of his Guru or his ista devata ("chosen deity").
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Finally, if indeed some black magic has been done, it is possible that some peculiar sign has been traced on a part of your house. Look for it and, if there is one, rub it off. Sometimes the work is done through a young boy or girl servant. In case you have any such servant, watch out for any peculiar behaviour on his or her part. Of course, all such servants are not mediums, and you need not sack them just because they are young.
. At any rate, have faith in the mantra I have mentioned and be fearless. All will be well.
(26.3.1989)
It's ten at night now. I am alone, but not lonely - for the Unseen is always there, and most on the point of visibility when one is by oneself. It is in such a condition that one is most able to help somebody who appeals for "a few words which will stimulate and gladden" his "aspiration". That is why I have kept this quiet indrawn hour reserved for wishing you "Bonne fete". And what I mean by this wish is that you may never forget the constant source of happiness which is so near but which you mistakenly think to be "still so far away". You most probably know the story from the Mahabharata which I once recounted in a "Talk" of mine. Let me remind you of it.
Draupadi was dragged to the court of Duryodhana and threatened that her clothing would be taken off. Strip-tease had not yet come into fashion and in any case she could never have been a striptease artist, so she was quite bashful. In full view of the court a brother of Duryodhana's started pulling at her dress. Draupadi did not know whom to turn to. She thought of Sri Krishna the Avatar and appealed to him in her mind. She cried out inwardly: "O Lord of the highest heaven, come to my aid!" There was no response. The poor girl became more desperate. She sent again her cry: "O Master of the three worlds, help me!" No reply still - and more and more folds of her apparel came out. Once again
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Draupadi raised her heart's plea: "O Ruler of the four quarters of the earth, rush to my rescue!" All in vain -nothing resulted. Draupadi was really at a loss. Then she cried out in a final intensity: "O You who are hiding deep in my own heart, come!" At once Sri Krishna appeared before her subtle vision with his hand gesturing abhaya - "Have no fear." The clothing went on unwinding endlessly. Draupadi could not be stripped at all.
Later she chided Sri Krishna: "Why did you take so long to come?" Sri Krishna sweetly and coolly replied: "If I had to come from the highest heaven or from the three worlds or even from the four quarters of the earth, wouldn't it take some time? But when you summoned me from your own heart, there was no distance to cross. Naturally I came at once."
What you are going through is nothing strange. All of us have felt at some time or other that "life is a drudgery and so barren." A pessimist has said:
Year after year of living,
Yet no difference from death
Save the nuisance of moving
And the tediousness of breath.
An optimist has offered the paradoxical consolation:
Keep on smiling - don't look glum:
There is always worse to come.
But all these are bad jokes that can be played on us if we haven't come to the Ashram. Once we are here, we have no need to despair. Even though things may look bleak, there is the assurance from Savitri:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss -
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And I may tell you that the sense of nothing wonderful happening in our sadhana from day to day does not reflect any reality for us who have given ourselves into the hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Their secret Presence is ever with us and they are carrying us forward no matter if we feel we are standing still. At some moment what is being prepared behind the scene will break forth. Keep on hoping that it may come out soon. The best way to draw it nearer the surface of our life is to let a quiet smile play on our lips, confident in the faith, which I have underlined to people again and again, that there is no abyss so deep that the Divine Grace cannot lift us from it sky-high.
The smile I speak of is surely within reach of you who are always full of humour - and it should be all the easier when you know that you have the love of everybody - and most warmly indeed of your friend who, in one of his poems has visioned a glorious moment of the God Agni's grace turning everything to flame and felicity:
Lo now my heart has grown his glimmering East -
Blown by his breath a cloud of colour runs -
The yearning curves of life are lit to a smile.
(8.11.1987)
You have become an expert dreamer - not only getting fascinating dreams, not only remembering them perfectly, but also exercising your analytic faculty in the course of them! The secret whispered to you - "Here is the end of the earth" - carried a symbolic meaning. Evidently it did not imply the end of your earth-life in a physical sense nor the end of the life of the earth - and, of course, the earth being round, there could be no real geographical end. The vision of North Africa that stretched before you, making you wonder whether beyond that vast expanse there was sea or mountain, symbolised the cosmic Ignorance in which we are set. Haven't you heard of Africa having been called "the Dark
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Continent''? And don't you know your speculation about the "other side" - "sea or mountain?" - touched upon the liberation from that Ignorance? The sea represents the Universal Consciousness and the mountain the Transcendent Reality. These are the two states of being that terminate the inner darkness in which our ordinary life is enclosed.
Naturally the question is: "How are we to get out of the cosmic Ignorance?" A suggestive answer was given in the next part of your dream-experience. You think that there was a "break". But actually the interval indicates the void expectant hush which is the pre-condition of our getting the answer to our life's problem. And what you term "the second phase of the dream" disclosed, again in a symbolic form, the answer: "Nolini, looking taller, bigger and fairer-complexioned" than in the outward physical aspect you had known. The tallness pointed to the Transcendent Reality, the bigness stood for the Universal Consciousness and the fairness represented the liberating light which would counteract the power of "the Dark Continent", the "Africa" of the earth-life's nescience. As Nolini had always struck you as the example par excellence of sadhana, it was inevitably his figure that you saw as the Saving Grace.
(18.5.1988)
I have commented quite often on your dreams of Nolini which seem to be stepping-stones towards your own Nolini-esque future - subtle contacts which are occasions for lighting up your consciousness with his own Mother-ward being. The adjective "Mother-ward" is of great importance, for we must not let the helpful friend of our heart be anything else than a cherished transparency - himself valuable in his own right of nearness and dearness to us but never ceasing to be a glimmering link between us and the all-luminous Presence who mothers his soul as well as ours.
The story of the meeting you had with Sri Aurobindo in a dream thrills me. The immediate answer by him to your
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ardent prayer before going to bed shows how close he is to you. The meeting started, you say, on the ground floor of the house. This indicates the subtle-physical plane. Then the contact moves to a place where the sensations are naturally intenser - the first floor, the vital-emotional with the psychic being adjoining it. The intimacy increases and culminates with his extending his hand towards you with a dish and wanting to fill you with food, a new life's substance. This gesture is meant to give you a chance to fulfil your desire for the divya sparsha, the divine touch: the index finger of the hand you stretch to receive the dish can manage to touch his hand. Here is your soul's pointer to a superhuman destiny for you. Indeed, as you exclaim, the Lord is both great and gracious.
The food-item in the dream brings me to your quotation from Savitri - the line which struck you while you were going through Book One, Canto Three:
On the tongue lingered the honey of paradise.
Food coming from the Divine symbolises essentially the mellifluous meeting between the Bliss of the Supreme Spirit and our human heart's insatiate hunger - insatiate because all that it finds in its search for happiness falls short:
All is too little that the world can give.
What that line about the paradisal honey is meant to convey most intimately is precisely the experience you were instantly reminded of on reading it: "During the early period of my stay in the Ashram... sometimes I used to feel a sweet secretion on my tongue. This continued for a period." Here is a rather rare experience. Sri Aurobindo himself had it and has explained it when a sadhak wrote to him of having the same experience. The gist of the explanation is that the Divine Ananda, the Supreme Bliss, can manifest itself in terms of physical sensation and be felt as a sweetness
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dripping upon the tongue through the brahmarandhra, the subtle opening that can take place at the top of the head to the spiritual ranges of consciousness beyond the brain-mind. This sweet sensation, says Sri Aurobindo, the Rishis of the Rigveda named amritam, the nectar of immortality.
His explanation sheds light on the fact that the Rishis, who personified the Divine Ananda as the godhead Soma, spoke of Soma as if it were an actual material drink. Ordinarily, commentators equate it to a hallucinogenic decoction in the ritual: researchers now hold it to be a preparation from the plant Ephedra. The esoteric view takes this preparation to be a symbol for an inner or higher immaterial Reality. But Yogic experience in exceptional moments discovers that the decoction was merely a substitute in external ceremony for something which was also material, though in a secret way, something which was an authentic translation of the supraphysical Reality into a sense-delight directly within the body and separate from any preparation to be taken in from outside.
I have used the epithet "material" for the sweet secretion, but truly speaking the tongue reflects, as it were, a sensation in the subtle-physical body which is ours behind the gross-physical. Were the saliva with the Soma-taste to be chemically analysed, I don't think a special sugary element would be detected. All the same, "the honey of paradise" remains a fact of bodily consciousness even if not of bodily substance.
It seems to me that this "honey" can come to us in various forms. It need not be confined to being a sweetness on the tongue. I consider it to be essentially present in what happened after the sudden pressure you felt on the middle of your forehead, the surface site of the Yogic ajna -chakra, the occult centre where thought and will can open to the Supreme Spirit. You write: "The feeling was very soothing and peaceful. It was coming down like a thin stream on my nose, eyes and the cheeks under the eyes. At times this feeling was so sensitive and strong that I felt like wiping it off. It continued. Even when I went to the Dining Room on
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foot, it did not wane. At times there was a pressure on my head too. As a matter of fact all that area of the body was vibrant. This is not the first time - in the past too 1 had the same experience on occasion. At tunes it lingered for hours. Do you agree with me if I say that it is peace that descends?"
If I have compared this experience with that of a strange sweetness in the mouth - both of them a prolonged flow from the inner and the higher being of ourselves - I should believe that what is at play is at once peace and power, serenity and felicity, Sri Aurobindo's imperturbable Himalaya getting mirrored in the Mother's gleaming and laughing Ganges.
Perhaps this description could apply also to the prolonged flow of Savitri, at the same time a grandeur of sight and a subtlety of sound. I am not surprised that you are "totally seized by Savitri and there is no escape". Your reading the poem "slowly" is just the right thing. The reason you give is delightful; you read slowly "lest it might finish soon". But actually Savitri can never be finished - it has depth beyond depth and it is no wonder that it is not only giving you "immense delight" but also "shedding more light than it did in the past", Sri Aurobindo has himself said that to him Savitri was not a poem to be written and done with: it was a ceaseless experiment of using poetic language again and again from an ever-ascending curve of spiritual consciousness - an adventure of seeing how far the speech of human poetry could go along the path of more and more lofty Yogic realisation. Across the years Savitri grew not in length alone: it increased immeasurably in a detailed depth from the time in 1936 when the Master first confided to me passages from it day after day to the time when in 1950 he gave by dictation touch on finishing touch by way of adding scores of new passages bringing out still greater secrets than before.most of the lines in Savitri, by being read slowly and audibly - with the ear no less than the eye inwardly on the alert - carry on an endlessly widening aura and vibrancy of suggestion to the soul in us. With each novel shade of spiritual reality caught
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in the words, our soul adds a cubit to its stature, visions "an ampler ether", breathes "a diviner air". Whether or not we experience a supernatural sweetness on our tongues with the reading of Savitri, always
Its tones of fathomless joy instil
A taste of the Ineffable.
(4.1.1991)
I like your calling me "Dadhikravan", the Rigveda's white horse galloping ever towards the dawn. As an inveterate lover of horses I cannot help feeling highly complimented. But what makes the compliment more desirable is that the animal of the Rigveda symbolises the purified life-force. The purification of the life-force is the rarest of rare achievements, and if I happen to be on the way to it nothing can be a better portent for my future. Without it neither the mind nor the body can be taken as totally given to God. The vital energy is the most effective element in us and it is the element by which the mind can have an impact on earth-circumstances and by which the body can carry out the mind's dreams and designs as well as its own hungers. But it is our most intractable part: its lust for pleasure and power appears to be endless and it can easily dictate its desires to its mental and physical companions. In the Rigveda the ultimate goal, figured as the dawn, is the outbreak of the Divine Consciousness upon our ignorance. And the final problem of Yoga is the turning of the vital energy away from its own vigour -first to the ideals of the visionary intelligence and to the healthy poise our limbs seek, then to the adventure of the Boundless and the Omnipotent. This turning towards its own Archetype, the supernal origin of its strength, so that a strange new elevation is achieved, seems to be pictured in that far-seeing line of the French poet Rimbaud:
Millions d'oiseaux d'or, 6 future vigueur!
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which may be rendered:
Millions of golden birds, O vigour to come!
Mark the word "golden". It points to an ilumination from some high space of being, an alchemisation of the gross drive into a purified passion. Here the life-force has found a superhuman freedom, the eternal Light has dissolved all limits, a multitudinous potency has touched it from a divine distance, a futurity of imperishable flame. In a different image we have here once more the stainlessly shining steed of the Rigveda, the uncheckable dawnward Dadhikravan.
I have to confess that this glorious creature is not yet a full-speeder in me. The process of purification has still much to catch up with. There are times when the inner movement seems to echo that line of Virgil's:l
Quadrupedante putrem quatit cursu ungula campum,
whose English lumination from
Horse-hooves trampled the crumbling plain with a
four-footed gallop.
But the outer movement lacks the full resonance of the inner occasions. The psychic being, the inmost soul, has its say again and again in the region of the life-force no less than in the realm of the thinker and the domain of the physical doer. Perhaps I may even aver that in basic matters it has brought about the consent of the vital energy to self-conversion: the horse's head has been turned irrevocably towards the Spirit's glimmering East and there is no halt in the pacing in that direction. What I await is the sweeping up of the total physical consciousness into the rhythm of the Rigveda's unstoppable courser with its eyes a-lit for ever.
(2.2.1991)
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16
Your long-distance call was a unique event in the history of Mother India. Never before has any voice from beyond Pondicherry come precisely in reponse to my work in our Monthly Review of Culture with such an irrepressible joy. In more than the sense of sheer surprise the call seemed to arrive "out of the blue". It was as if Sri Aurobindo, from another world which is yet mindful of earth's aspiration and effort, had found on earth a receptive soul to transmit his still continuing appreciation of what a child of his had been trying to do ever since February 1949 for a periodical about which he had once said when a carping critic had doubted the authenticity of the views expressed in its pages: "Doesn't he know that Mother India is my paper?"
I have mentioned "Sri Aurobindo", but I should add "The Mother". For, the sense of both of them glowed in my being as soon as I reatised the wonder of the far-away, along with the happy thrill in the admiring voice. There was not only the communication as of a light of understanding from some height: there was also the communication as of a delight from some depth. And by a coincidence which yet seemed most natural, the voice identified itself as "Aditi"! The grandest conception in the Rigveda - greater than that of Mitra-Varuna or Indra-Agni or Surya-Soma - is the one in which the Rishis bring close to our souls from a rapturous all-ruling remoteness the Mother of the Gods: Aditi, the personification of the Illimitable, the Ultimate. Appropriate here would be those lines from Sri Aurobindo's poem, "Bride of the Fire":
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart,
Thank you, sweet human namesake of that Mightiness -twice "thank you", for in the wake of the congratulation on
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the phone came the letter in symbolic colours: white envelope, pink notepaper, reminding me of that phrase of Sri Aurobindo's in his poem "Flame-Wind": "the white and rose of the heart." Indeed expressive were they of the heart's inmost qualities - "light and sweetness", purity of perception and intensity of affection. I am not using these words idly. They correspond to the reality and hit off exactly your letter's contents. You have not only liked the general sweep of my writings but savoured specific individual parts of them and quoted the turns of phrase that struck you as most true to the various movements of the inner life. Here to be "true" is to be "beautiful", for the inner life has an enchantment which cannot be caught in language unless the language has a felicitous form. That is why poetry whose concentration is on beauty is best able to convey the richness and harmony distinguishing spiritual truths. In addition to the acuity of discernment in your letter, there is the wide warmth of it, typical of the soul's gesture which is always in tune with the universal Krishna, the omnipresent Vasudeva who is at once at play with myriads while being felt as each one's special beloved.
It was good to meet your father. Years of distance did not prevent us from getting close immediately. We are running neck and neck in the race to nonagenarianism. I was amazed at the long list of books you had ordered. And it is typical of the bibliophile such as Southey celebrates in the poem from which you have quoted two lines, that you should be happy I increased your list. Three books of mine are still missing because these are out of print: Sri Aurobindo - the Poet, The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo and Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare. The last one has gone in for a second edition, with an added appendix giving two references I had somehow missed.* This book has been rather popular. I remember that on a visit to Bombay many years ago I called at a bookshop to inquire how the sale of my productions stood. The owner
"Editor's Note: The new edition was out in the middle of last April.
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told me: "One of your books is creating a lot of interest." I asked: "Which one?" He answered: "Shakespeare on Sri Aurobindo." I exclaimed: "No wonder! It must surely be the most original book I could ever have written." He nodded with an innocent smile.
I was glad to know of your love of flowers. Lately I have opened in a very concrete way to the influence of leaves and blooms on our mind and heart. The leafy greenery conveys great ease to my heart when trudging with my poor legs from the Ashram gate to the Samadhi puts a strain on me. And the many-coloured many-shaped flowers shoot into me little bursts of joy, bringing a smile to my tense face as it looks forward to my seat in the Ashram courtyard.
I am grateful to Dr. Roerich for the warm regards he has sent through you. I reach out to you with the deepest affection.
(10.5.1990)
You have been in my heart all these days even though I haven't been able to put my heartbeats in rhythm with the eager play of the typewriter keys.
The lovely feeling of joy rising in you in response to my letter and making you wonder how it comes "wave after wave, never-ending, ever-growing, from no dramatic outward event, only an inner exultation, an inner celebration" -there cannot be a truer description than this of the authentic soul-movement. That movement is non-effusive yet most intense and does not depend on anything outward, it springs from an eternal source in the infinite self-existence of the Divine in our depths and goes forth to the same limitless reality in the manifested world. A special mark of it is that what is a universal light is known by it also as an individual form of enchanting beauty and ineffable love, a pulsing personal centre whose happy aureole is a light fanning out in all directions. From the very beginning of my stay in the Ashram I have sought to quicken to the presence of Sri
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Aurobindo and the Mother from the core of my heart. Although I came to them with a mind keenly interested in spiritual philosophy what had brought me was an inner urge I hardly understood and only knew as something strange within my chest which yearned for an Unknown surpassing every object of my sense and my thought and making nothing worthwhile unless that Unknown were first found. Again and again I asked the Mother to put her hand on my chest and open up what dimly and dumbly quivered, deep inside, to meet in full the mystery of the endless warmth I felt within her eyes and the vast wisdom I glimpsed within Sri Aurobindo's.
A peculiar sign of "the imprisoned splendour" (Browning's phrase) was that every time I closed my eyes to meditate I got a vague pain in my chest as if something wanted to come out and was baulked by a barrier. I spoke to the Mother about the pain. She said: "Don't worry. I know what it is. It will go." A few months later, suddenly I had the sense of a wall breaking down in my chest - and there was instead a shining space, as it were, within which indescribable flames and fragrances sprang up and a wide happiness without a cause pervaded my whole being. I was resting in bed in the afternoon when this opening took place. I lay breathless for a while. The ecstasy was more than I could bear. And when I could cope with the explosion I wished it would go on and on. Of course it could not continue at that pitch. But from that time onward the soul, which had acted from the background and influenced me indirectly, became a part of my conscious life. It used to play temporary hide-and-seek but never more was there a wall between me and this delegate of the Divine. Not that I never went astray. Various parts of my complex being demanded their satisfaction and my will could waver and my steps leave the "sunlit path". This is a strange phenomenon - the unregenerate parts clamouring on one side and on the other the little steady glow exposing their falsity -
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A flame that is All,
Yet the touch of a flower -
A sun grown soft and small.
The last line here reminds me of Newman's hymn which you like so much. The soul could be from day to day the "kindly light" showing us the one step forward needed on our path to perfection. My own favourite hymn is "Abide with me". I remember showing the Mother a combined miniature photograph of her and Sri Aurobindo which I used to carry in my wallet and on the back of which I had written: "Help of the helpless." The Mother was quite interested at this unexpected inscription. But the words expressed my attitude precisely and I told the Mother that my lame leg made them all the more appropriate. Perhaps I should have quoted those lines of Savitri:
...Mind, a glorious traveller in the sky,
Walks lamely on the earth with footsteps slow;
Hardly he can mould the life's rebellious stuff,
Hardly can he hold the galloping hooves of sense.
Anyway, do you know the hymn from which I wrote those words behind my pocket-photo? Three couplets have impressed themselves on my memory:
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide -
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide....
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me....
Change and decay in- all around I see;
O Thou who changes! not, abide with me.
Perhaps you know this hymn already? If you don't, get hold of the recording - as far as I recollect - of Dame Melba's or
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Clara Butt's recitation. It is a very haunting and moving tune.
The temper and tone of the hymn breathe intense aspiration. If the result of such aspiration is to be sought in any words inscribed by a God-worshipper I would pick out those which Longfellow has given us, called "Saint Teresa's Bookmark", evidently a translation of that Saint's own writing:
Let nothing disturb thee.
Nothing affright thee;
All things are passing;
God never changeth;
Patient endurance
Attaineth to all things;
Who God possesseth
In nothing is wanting;
Alone God sufficeth.
When I am with expressions of profound moods - either an exquisite religious urge or a settled mystical state with outflowing benedictions to those who need it yet have not reached its shelter - my mind keeps racing towards analogous utterances. One which Saint Teresa's sense of the all-satisfying plenitude of God's eternity suggests to me at the moment is a stanza I recall from Emily Bronte. Here we have in a concentrated form a philosophical dictum swept into poetic vision with a passionate severity of what I may term intuitive thought:
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Perhaps I may round off these literary-spiritual recoveries from my memory with two more. First, a harking backward to the Chandogya Upanishad's summing up of the human
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heart's ultimate experience: "There is no happiness in the small. Immensity alone is felicity." Then as the grand finale that Mantric line from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, a quintessential pointer to the end of all travail:
Our life's repose is in the Infinite.
Not irrelevant in this context is your question about "longing" and "attachment". It is a crucial question and cuts down to the very first principles of Yoga. Short of doing Yoga, all you say is nothing to be contradicted - and actually you have, a natural affinity to the psychic being's turn towards the Divine - one of the prominent signs of its working is a longing for the Beautiful everywhere. You are also on the right track when you say: "Why is attachment to be given up? Isn't the important thing what we are attached to and not attachment itself?" But it is necessary to define "attachment" as well as "the Beautiful". Referring to a line of Sri Aurobindo's poem, "Bride of the Fire", you ask: "Why should 'longing' be sacrificed?" But the whole stanza reads: .
Beauty of the Light, surround my life, -
Beauty of the Light!
I have sacrificed longing and parted from grief,
I can bear Thy delight.
The Beauty invoked is that which is a blissful harmonious manifestation of a Supreme Consciousness free from all the shadows and shortcomings of the common objects of human love. Not that these objects are to be disdained and rejected, but the usual way they are approached and valued has to change. They are approached with a "longing" which is bound up with "grief" because they are loved by the divisive ego in us for the limited ego in them and not by the leap of the soul to the sheer soul. There is expectation on our side and, if it is not fulfilled, grief will follow for us - and, if our demand cannot be met by the person whom we love, this
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person too will grieve, feeling as he must that he has fallen below our expectation. Wherever any grief is bound up with longing, the joy obtained is limited and non-lasting. There is a greater joy to which Sri Aurobindo points, a joy whose ideal intensity and immensity are not easy to come by and cannot be reached unless we set aside the lesser joys by giving up the all-too-human longing which is intertwined with the ego's suffering grief or inflicting it. More intense and immense, this joy involves not only a higher attuning in us but also a capacity to stand the loss of ordinary joys. Hence the phrase: "I can bear thy delight."
No doubt, Sri Aurobindo does not order us to abandon God's multiple manifestation. There is a value in it and we have to cherish that value, but we have to learn - as the famous exquisite lines of Yeats's have it - to see
In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
We may even go further and affirm with two lines of Amal Kiran in a super-Yeatsian mood:
The Eternal Beauty is a wanderer
Hungry for lips of clay.
But now an important qualification comes in, which is hinted at by your query: "Isn't the important thing what we are attached to and not attachment itself?" Here the thing to be attached to is not "all poor foolish things" in their transience or 'Tips of clay" in their earthiness but the Eternal Beauty itself in its own direct substance, its own intrinsic form recognised as being at the same time those short-lived moulds and beyond them. If the sense of the "beyond" does not suffuse the sense of the "within", we have not felt wholly and truly the "longing for the Beautiful". And here the point about "attachment" gets rightly answered .To be attached to the eternal beauty must imply a deep degree of
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non-attachment to its temporary or restricted manifestation. That is why in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, much stress is laid on what he terms "equality", which we may ordinarily designate as "equanimity". By equanimity we have an equal attitude towards all events - a facing of everything with an unaltered peace. No reaction of a personal nature to any impact from outside - no excited rejoicing, no upsetting distress, no impulsive anger. By this constant composure we acquire a distance from the entire play of time and, while discerning the Divine everywhere, remain uncaught by the nama-rupa under which the Supreme manifests. The grip of "name and form" loosens and we are free to meet the Reality transcending them. Equanimity in the Aurobindonian Yoga does not dry up the heart. Against a background of vast illumined tranquillity the heart keeps functioning but now serving like a centre of pure light and a core of clear warmth to that background. Only thus can we be human with all the tenderness possible, all the attention needed by the call of earth and yet know the inner liberty without which we are ill-equipped to experience the touch of the Eternal Beauty and be its instruments in a fallible and mutable world.
As for your inquiry about "the breath of a sevenfold noon" in Sri Aurobindo's "Flame-Wind", I suppose the adjective "sevenfold" which puzzles you is an intensive word, signifying "multiple" and suggesting "plenary" in a concrete fashion. In the ancient world-vision, "seven" was an important number: there were seven planes comprising the whole creation and there were seven rishis covering the whole gamut of possible acquisition of wisdom. A noon of power raised to the nth degree is brought by the breath. Passion, dynamism, eclat, the mind and the vital force in extreme action are conjured up, overwhelming whatever the heart may have to say, the heart with its quiet yet profound "rose and white" of love.
I am glad that Dr. Roerich is interested in my comments. Did I write to you that I was a great admirer of his father and have seen his own work with deep pleasure? Both father and
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son possess considerable insight into the hidden soul of things. I had a passing acquaintance with Dr. Roerich's wife Devika Rani when she used to act in the early Indian films. I remember her as a rare beauty.
(7.6.1990)
It's been a longish time since I last wrote to you. I have been busy with a lot of matters. The main preoccupation was to read and revise the typescript of a certain book of mine which at last I have decided to send off to a publisher in Holland who has lately been bringing out researches in Jewish subjects. My book - don't gasp at the title - is called The Beginning of History for Israel. The subtitle is: "How long did the Israelites stay in Egypt? - When was their Exodus? -What was the Period of their Conquest of Palestine?" and a general pointer to the work done by me is called "A Reassessment of Historical, Literary and Archaeological Evidence." One may wonder why I wrote this book, which has entailed an abundance of meticulous research and cannot be of much interest to the Indian public. There were two reasons. The Mother is known to have remarked that it was Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (one of the Mother's own past incarnations) who was the princess said in the Old Testament to have asked her maids to pick up the basket in which baby Moses had been left on a river's bank. This gave me the approximate date of the birth of Moses. From it I could work out all the other necessary dates according to the numbers given by the Bible. This series of dates differed by nearly a century and a half from the chronology currently accepted by scholars and even by the State of Israel - with small variations here and there. That chronology stems from the greatest authority on the subject: William Foxwell Albright. So I was faced with the job of demolishing him in favour of the scheme inspired by the Mother. Just the fact that he was the great Panjandrum in this sphere made me feel like the war-horse in the Bible neighing "Ha-ha" at the smell of the
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battlefield. "The fascination of what's difficult", as Yeats puts it in a poem, drove me on through months and months of close study to complete a book of 231 double-spaced typed pages. It has been lying among my 18 still-unpublished works for several years. Now I have pulled it out to cross the t's and dot the i's before packing it off to Mr. Brille of Leiden. All publishers have their Readers who estimate the typescript received. I hope the Reader who deals with my thesis has an open mind and William Foxwell Albright has not already imposed his erudite Will on him and Foxed him well into believing that the current theory is All Bright!
Now let me turn from me and my antiquity to the living moment and you. I have before me the photographs you have sent. Each has a disclosure to make to me of my newly found friend's many-shaded being. The one with "little Sheetal" on her birthday in your office-room brings home to me several "truths" of your l ife. The way you hold her in your arms and the expression you wear on your face tell me that though you have to do with a lot of children as pupils you do not lose the individual child in the midst of the group. Each child is a special revelation to you and you deal with it with a "dream" of the future proper to it alone - a future in response to its soul's present with the unique possibilities you have intuited in its budding beauty. Your slightly smiling face shows by its blend of joy and calm an affectionate ardour playing around a poise of patience - a poise charged with understanding of the child's depths along with pleasure in its changing momentary moods. Further, your patience prevents you from getting easily irritated - or, if by any chance, there is any irritation it passes quickly and does not flare up into anger. Your office is quite tidy and tastefully decorated. It speaks of a gift for artistic order. The epithet "artistic" is important. For there can be an order which is mechanical or conventional. Also, the epithet implies that one is not a slave to a fetish. If one is orderly, it is only with an artistic turn - that is, by following an inner sense of accordances which expresses an originality of vision. But the
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capacity of artistic order does not compel one to follow that sense always. It leaves room for a spontaneous care-free condition at times which does not mind a degree of disorder. To act from within outward is not to be bound down to anything. Whatever is non-mechanical, non-conventional is admissible. And under that category one may list even "wild Nature" which can differ from all man-made creation, however artistic, and yet have a ravishing loveliness. When one goes from within outward, one's eye for beauty can be multi-sensitive, alert to all forces at work in the human domain or the natural world.
One of the pictures catches you, as you say, "between verdant earth and azure sky, a happy state of being". It is not exactly a scene of "wild Nature" but there is enough of Nature's presence, not only varied but ample, to make you look a glad escapee from so-called civilised schemes and regulations. What strikes me in addition to this is that you are alone - almost a speck in the expansive panorama, yet in entire tune with it as if the spirit of the expanses were itself concentrated in that little human body so that in spite of its apparent tinyness it holds an intoxication with distances and rejoices in being alone, cut off from the crowd which would be a largeness of excited egos. Such a crowd would be quite contrary to the spacious impersonality of the green and the azure that is Nature's - a milieu in which one sees no end, one seeks no halting-place, one feels secret after secret delivered from some infinity to unplumbed depths in oneself. In this environment a poet could say about a poet as in a Line of my own:
Mention of poet along with mention of Nature reminds me of sending you a short piece I wrote many years ago. Glimpsing the flower-vase and the flower-painting in the photo of your office-room I am led to lay before you the picture of Amal the Gardener, now deep-sighted rather than "far-visioned":
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EDEN EVER-PRESENT
O the dew-dipped delicious drudgery
For red and blue and white and yellow pomps
Reigning with perfect petals over the dust!
Back bent, I serve them and on grateful knees
Touch with a mighty worship the frail kings.
One careless finger is their empire's doom -
Yet on my thoughts their pollen strews a blessing
And every breath of scent is a command;
For, each round tuft of quiet colour pricks
A flawless hole in some enormous veil -
A light shoots up and lays bare all my flowers
Small and precarious by brief difficult
Thrustings of paradise through clods of clay!
(If you find the construction of the last three lines a little obscure, put "as" or "to be" before "small". This kind of compressed expression, though dubious by common grammatical rules, is a poetic licence for the sake of direct felicitous effect.)
Now back to your series of photos. The one in which you are, as you write, "at Mahabalipuram, a splendid legacy of the past", appeals to me particularly for two reasons. First, you are again all by yourself. A number of people would have spoilt the impression of quiet happy communion with the spirit of the antique monument. Superficial tourism would have been suggested. Secondly, though at first glance your bright orange dress is a bit of a shock against the grey massive ruined artistry of the immobile stones, you have stood at some artistic instinct in front of a dark aperture which seems a background of mystery from which your vivid colour and living personality emerge in the most natural way. At the same time the loud-looking present is subdued and the silent-seeming past springs to life and finds the secret of its creative urge bodied forth from old times in a living "Now", disclosing, as it were, the joyful soul which
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worked out its dream of grandiose response to the infinite Spirit whose mighty Ananda has structured the multiform unity of the cosmos.
Finally, the snap of you and the well-known artist Dr. Svetoslav Roerich, on the back of which you have written: "With a friend whom I revere with all my heart." Your fine feeling comes out well in the picture. There is a warm nearn ess combined with what I may call a sweet submissive-ness as to someone who holds great depths in himself. From the far-away contemplation of an unreachable Beauty the eyes of Dr. Roerich look at once most gently and most penetratingly into the human condition and strive to seize in terms of art the pleasure and pain, the shine and shadow of its varied aspiration. His work comes nearer to common humanity than that of his father Nicholas, though I must add that the latter's work was not really "cold" in spite of its preoccupation with the Himalaya any more than one can consider as really cold the presence of that mighty mountain that is like a vast guardian of the land that lies at its foot. If 1 have to talk in ultimate language, I may aver that the father's art conveys, knowingly or unknowingly, a sense of the benevolent transcendent Godhead, the Supreme who is above and yet not aloof, while the son's art inspires, consciously or unconsciously, a sense of the compassionate immanent Godhead, the Supreme who is always with us because he is within us.
This letter has become very long. I'll stop now with love to you and all the others of your wonderful family.
(26.7.1990)
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17
I have two letters from you and some photos. The first recounts the misery you feel when you don't hear from me for a long time. Fart of your misery is due to your fear that I may be unwell or may even have bidden goodbye to the earth. Except for the infirmity of my legs I am in fair-enough health and have had no wish to become "the late lamented". In fact I am likely to be rather "late" in becoming "lamented": I am already past 86. So be of good cheer. And what is this appeal to me that if I quit the earth-scene I should carry you along with me? You are 30 years younger than I am. Life for people like us is for doing Yoga and you should never think of cutting short the wondrous opportunity we have of coming closer and closer in heart and mind to Sri Aurobindo's glorious Light and the Mother's gracious Beauty. As much sadhana as possible is to be packed in the span of time available to us. Sadhana cannot be done except in the process of terrestrial evolution where alone it is significant: apart or away from it are the non-evolutionary "typal" planes. On each of them the consciousness is fixed in its own type, already fulfilled and playing variations on the same satisfying theme, "with no need left to aspire", as Sri Aurobindo says in his poem "The Life Heavens". To adopt Tennyson's words, only on earth are there
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
and hence an environment and provision to seek a remedy for its ache and realise the Divine. Bodily life is precious for the chance given us of questing for God through birth after birth and turning all conditions here into a happy home for Him. At present He is only a visitor; we have to build a permanent habitation for Him, making Him a universal King not only in the inner recesses of an illumined mankind but also in the outer circumstances of a transformed humanity.
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So don't be in a hurry to quit "this transient and unhappy world", the Gita's anityam asukham lokam imam, without carrying out as much and as long as you can the command of Sri Krishna: bhajasva mam, "love "and worship Me." Sri Krishna has graced our times with a manifestation still more luminous than in the period of the Bharata War. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have touched our earth with the blessings of their holy feet. Let us do our best to follow in their footsteps. Particularly you who have heard the call of the Magic Flute from the very beginning of your life should lengthen to the utmost the years in which you can attune your heartbeats to its depth-awakening notes.
You have referred me to your palm extended in the photo of you in bhava samadhi. I looked at it as soon as I saw the picture. But the lines are not clearly shown. As for my own palms, the life-line of my left hand is rather short. It may be pointing to the crisis I went through at the age of 34 when, as the Mother has said in a talk of hers, I would have surely died if something within hadn't instantaneously drawn her help because, according to the Mother, there happened to be the habit of remembering her and being in touch with her in a spontaneous and natural way. The line on my right palm is fairly long - strongly marked more than two-thirds of the way: then it becomes a little lighter but is long enough. So, from the point of view of palmistry, I shall be receiving your letters and communicating with you, though sometimes after a bit of delay, for quite a number of years. Set your sweet soul at rest and keep smiling as you so charmingly do in the photo you have enclosed of May 1964 with your landlady. Do you still smile often enough? You must guard against becoming too serious. Those whom Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have drawn into their radiance must let that spiritual sunshine come often to their faces.
Here I am not recommending just a jolly temperament, though that is an advantage. I am encouraging essentially the practice of being in contact with the glowing presence of our Gurus. By this contact I don't mean only the sense of them in
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our ever-aspiring souls. I mean also a constant remembrance of their bodily existence - the forms in which they walked on our earth. Those who have seen and met them personally will find such remembrance automatic. But even those who have not can practise a lively substitute for it on the evidence of their photographs. The Mother has said that each of their pictures is charged with the light of their consciousness. So these pictures, in their own way, carry the same aura that accompanies the memory of them for those who have physically known them. To be aware keenly of their bodily being is the source of a profound joy which, besides leading us to look at outward events with an eager or a patient smile, becomes an easy yet most effective process of sadhana, for it helps us to infuse into all our words and acts in the midst of outward events the awareness of the Mother looking at us and calling us to let our inmost souls be at play in whatever we do. When there have been concrete manifestations of the Divine Reality, when the very bodily substance has proved to be the instrument of God-realisation, when living and moving persons amongst us have been communicative of the Eternal and the Infinite, it will indeed be a pity if we fail to be in as vivid a relationship as possible with such a great gesture of the Supreme's Grace towards weak and ignorant humans.
Tennyson has called each of us
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.
In answer to this appeal from age to age the Heavenly Parents have come at last - in shapes like our own and assuming the myriad difficulties with which we are beset so that by dissolving them in their own consciousness they may render available to us a solution of those resistances in ourselves. Because of these aims and achievements their bodies have grown centres of a beatific bounty. By concentra-
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ting on their bodies that have acted like ours yet won through to superhuman purity and peace, to deific love and power, we by faith and devotion can best attain our soul's fulfilment. Steeping our whole identity in a vision of the physical presence which the highest Purusha and His Shakti have projected in order to assist and consummate our evolution, we should pass our lives. At least, this is what I strive to do, this is what I define as my "Integral Yoga". The sweet and hallowed memories of the Mother's heart-hushing movements and Sri Aurobindo's mind-kindling repose as I have known them down the years are fundamentally the process I feel as carrying me onward. And when anyone happens to come to me for advice or encouragement, all I attempt to do is to let my recollection of the Mother's multi-splendoured eyes animate my words with the new life she has brought and the image of Sri Aurobindo's imperturbable gaze render my silences significant with mysteries never revealed before his advent.
Here let me go a little off at a tangent though not without essential relevance to my theme. There are two sides to my not inappropriate digression. The Mother always responded to the genuine leap of the heart to her and in a couple of seconds she could fill us with the rapture of her response. I have observed that several people whose deep-seated connection with her was known to me spent less than a minute in their pranam to her. Within that short time there was a perfect give-and-take. Many took much longer. Whenever the length of time had a special movement of the inner being behind it, the Mother always had a patient appreciative concentration in answer to it. But often she seemed to be just indulgent and kind. I know that she set no great store by mere ceremony. This attitude applied in general to the common religious practice of mankind. Formal devotional-ism had little meaning for her. I have heard her say in effect: "Far better than church-going and temple-visiting and conventional rites is a simple disinterested act. The Divine does not crave for or need worship as such. Much more valuable
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in his eyes as a movement of spirituality is an unselfish deed."
On the other hand(the Mother was always alert to the special gift Sri Aurobindo and she had come, at a great deal of unspoken sacrifice, to give to suffering and aspiring humanity. Indescribable was the smile, at the same time most intimate as if tasting the nectar of a truly devoted soul's flow of itself towards her and most remote as though looking earthward from the height of an impersonal plenitude of a hitherto-unknown grace - the smile that often went out from her to her children during their daily exchanges of love. Her sense of the new light which Sri Aurobindo had drawn from rare altitudes and was being lavishly distributed by her to their disciples was always lively - in fact it could not help being such to one who was an incarnation of this light. That sense made her keenly aware of whether or not the people who approached her were alive to the novel bounty. I recollect her telling me once about some visitors who had meditated with her: "They sat absorbed in what was evidently to them a fine spiritual state, but there was no connection at all with me!" Doubtless, she appreciated their attainment but she knew also the waste of the largesse she had been born to scatter and the loss to these seekers who happened to be locked up in whatever they had caught of the world's great spiritual past without becoming sensitive to the enlarging continuation of it for which Sri Aurobindo and she had accepted the burden of embodiment.
Your smiling photo has led me quite far a-field. Another one shows a rather Shakespearian forehead. I am sure it would have pleased our Master. He regarded Shakespeare as extraordinarily intuitive in his poetic expression. Perhaps he would have found your facial expression a pointer to an inner intuitiveness?
I see from what you have written that the spiritual pursuit is the most instinctive thing for you and that your resolve not to get married was never an ascetic fight with yourself: it was absolutely in accord with the trend of your own being. Lucky
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girl to be blessed with such an in-born turn towards the A11-Blissful from your very teens!
(29.4.1991)
I am glad that, looking at the picture of me which is with you, you find my forehead as Shakespearian as yours. My resemblance to the Bard must be closer because I am far nearer than you as a woman can be to the scarcity of hair above the forehead - another characteristic of the great Elizabethan dramatist. How he got so baldish at a relatively early age is a mystery. He died at the age of 52. Of course, he had his worries as we know from his Sonnets, but were they bad enough to weaken his hair-roots? I can imagine a particular worry doing immense damage. It is the one he would have been visited with if he had been like that strange entity which has inspired one of the greatest phrases his intuitive poetic mind created:
If he could have prophesied the bitter controversy that has raged in later times as to whether he himself penned those 36 plays bearing his name or they were the work of either Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman or else Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, he would have been upset enough to tear his hair! I am sure he was never given to any such "dreaming on things to come". So I can't understand why at 52 years his pate was almost hairless. Maybe when the life-expectancy was much less than in modern times the bodily changes were speeded up. The age of 52 was considered in the sixteenth century to make one quite venerably old because the average life-span was no more than 60 years. As the famous Sonnets prove, the age of 40 was rated as furrowing and drying up one's face and beginning to run one's blood cold. If the poet's own physiog-
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nomy is mirrored in these words, I must be comparatively in the prime of life at 86 years and 6 months since people remark about my "mug" that though my jowls sag a little my eyes have neither crow's-feet on their sides nor pouches below.
Now a brief reflection on palmistry. I am surprised that you have gone one better on me by showing no Life-line at all on your left palm! 1 have always had doubts about palmistry and this fact should clinch them. Facts of my own palms should also help my scepticism. Just as my life-line is very short on my left hand, my head-line is deeply marked for a very brief length on my right. Afterwards there is a faint continuation. This should show that I was in good mental shape for about half my life and then began to deteriorate into a blooming idiot. At present I must be pretty advanced in mindlessness. Perhaps it is true in a sense beyond the comprehension of palmists. For it is only when the mind ceases to act that the higher light takes up the job of working in its place. I am very far from being able to say about myself what Sri Aurobindo once wrote to me about his mind -namely, that it was eternally quiet and that everything came to him from "overhead". But my practice, helped all the time by Sri Aurobindo, of receiving poetic inspiration again and again from the planes above that of the creative intelligence -Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has trained the mental Me not exactly to escape
...from the confines of thought
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth1
but at least to follow the inspiring precept:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight2
or else to call down splendid surprises of vision and rhythm
1.Savitri (Centenary Ed.), p. 383.
2.Ibid,, p. 276.
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without letting the usual inhabitants of the thought-world interfere with the Higher Mind's large clarities of spiritually vibrant Ideas, the illumined Mind's passion and colour of revelatory images, the Intuition's sudden glowing stabs into the very heart of things, the Overmind's massive mighty movements bringing forth an eternal world-voice from even the smallest transience of Nature's process and human life.
Further, the practice of intent receptivity to the Beyond in the midst of the common run of thinkings and willings and rememberings has given an ease to these ordinary mental modes so that there is very little sense of exertion and an almost utter absence of what is termed "brain-fag". The usual intelligence seems urged by unseen hands and moved to brighter issues than it would normally envisage. No doubt, there are less spontaneous, less felicitous intervals but a fair amount of freedom from mental labour has been one of the boons granted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Yes, great has been their grace in several ways. Yet how far am I from the spiritual states which were Aswapati's in Savitr! When will I be able to say about myself at all times any of the things said of him? - for instance:
Indifferent to the little outpost Mind,
He dwelt in the wideness of the Eternal's reign.
His being now exceeded thinkable Space,
His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic sight:
A universal light was in his eyes,
A golden influx flowed through heart and brain;
A force came down into his mortal limbs,
A current from eternal seas of Bliss;
He felt the invasion and the nameless joy.3
Enough of this digression about my own pluses and minuses. Let me return to your concerns. You write: "My nature has been serious from the very beginning but zealous
3. Ibid., p. 79.
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always. I become gloomy sometimes. From 1981 to 1986 sadness and depression overwhelmed me but when I read your book Light and Laughter in 1984-end I felt pulled up." You also say you heard Sri Aurobindo's voice telling you during a meditation: "Weeping and depression are not for you. You must be a warrior. Be bold. Smile out." If we are sincere in our choice of the spiritual path, we shall always have the presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother with us and that presence is at the same time an extreme sweetness and a never-failing strength. Physical suffering is not always avoidable — a headache or a rheumatic joint may have to be endured, but it is possible to keep the heart suffused with a quiet joy which does not depend on anything for its existence, since it is the outflow of the soul's little bit of oneness with the secret blissful basis of all that exists - the Divine Mystery which is always waiting to enfold our sighs and our sufferings because of that most wonderful of all paradoxes: Etermity in love with Time.
I am glad you are constantly reading those two supreme masterpieces of Sri Aurobindo: Savitri and The Life Divine. They are also rated as perhaps the most difficult of his writings - but their charm is that the difficult matter is conveyed in the most engrossing manner. Whether or not you follow precisely the thought building up in The Life Divine, the breath of its inspiration carries you onward and upward and you feel that even if you can't trace minutely with your mind all the lines and curves of this colossal architecture your being seems to get stretched wide and pulled high as though a new personality were in process of construction. Of course if one is able to follow the various directions of the multitudinous yet accurately marshalled thought one will be aware of the inner restructuring with greater clarity, but even otherwise invisible hands will go on raising up in your depths a more Aurobindonian You. For here is not a Spinoza or Hegel challenging you to trace the edifice of his speculative system: here is God's grace seeking to impress on the deepest part of your mind the shape of the
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cosmic vision projected by a power beyond the mind. Sri Aurobindo's philosophical revelation is bent on giving itself to you and, whether you completely grasp or not its grand details, it will enter into you and remain there a vibrant mass of glorious meanings fashioning anew your look on life and universe and godhead. The only condition we may take it to make is that you should not read too much at a stretch. The moment you feel the slightest strain, stop. Read slowly, happily and try to imagine that your head is open at the top, for all that Sri Aurobindo has written has its origin in what we may call the Spirit's ether.
This way of reading and of receptivity holds even more for Savitri, since Savitri is in tenser literature than The Life Divine. Not only does it go into more vivid disclosures of spiritual reality: it also comes with what one may designate as the very life-throb of occult realms, it carries in its surge or sway of interrelated words and modulated metre the footprints and footfalls, as it were, of divinities in traffic with earth.
You have referred to my comments on Savitri in my book Sri Aurobindo - the Poet. They comprise three articles. The first tells how Savitri, Sri Aurobindo's long-kept secret, got slowly divulged to me in private, with a tremendous response from me and a profound gesture of gratitude on my part. The second tries to explicate the sense of the poem's opening passage on "the hour before the Gods awake". The night spoken of here has baffled many readers. They have the impression that Sri Aurobindo is describing the very commencement of the cosmic manifestation from the Incons-cience. But, as shown by his letters to me as well as by hints in the passage itself -
In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse...
As in a dark beginning of all things...
A mute featureless semblance of the Unknown...
he is speaking in terms of symbolism and comparison and
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similitude. What he is dealing with is the night preceding the dawn of the day on which "Satyavan must die". Like the dawn which serves as a symbol of the divine illumination to come for man's consciousness in the future, this night is made to image the Divine's utter self-concealment in what the Rigveda calls "darkness wrapped within darkness" at the start of the univers's evolution. My third piece dwells on the various qualities of Savitri as a poem and as a revelation.
You have paid a great compliment to my letters to you. If they stimulate you inwardly and even infuse more life into you so that you are helped to get over your bouts of ill-health I am deeply thankful to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother whom I invoke every time I write. Before I put pen to paper or tap the keys of my typewriter I look within me and associate our Gurus with the act of communicating with my friends. Be the subject seemingly trivial or patently serious, there is always this association and in touching on serious matters I try as much as possible not merely to paraphrase out of a book but to convey what has been proved upon my own pulses.
Let me close with telling you of the soul-"pulsing" of a few days back. At the Samadhi usually something or other which leaves a happy mark on me takes place. At times the mark is very deep. On the 9th of this month the afternoon air brought particularly a breath of silence and solitude but with a secret in them of some unimaginable future outflowering. Suddenly a mantra of Vivekananda's sprang to my mind as if to crystallise the condition in which I was caught up. Vivekananda once spoke of his ideal of sitting in meditation under a height in the Himalayas and hearing a waterfall thunder forth: "Hara! Hara! - Vyom! Vyom!" (Sanskrit for "The Free! The Free! The Void! The Void!"). I felt completely divested of all bonds, all attachments and the whole courtyard seemed entirely empty of every creature, yet there was no sense of any deprivation. A mysterious fullness within a wondrous vacuity: such was my "experience". What was totally free and void appeared to be waiting to be repopu-lated - by millions of Sri Aurobindo, a countless number of
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the Divine Mother! It was the thrilling presage of a transformed humanity, a perfected earth-life. This prophetic part of the "experience" denoted the new turn given by the Integral Yoga - the creative turn - to the glorious escapism of the old spirituality, the grand flight from the finite and the fugitive. No ultimate power was conceived in the past as coming back from the Absolute to renovate everything in the future so as to evoke from some super-Shakespearian Miranda the cry: .
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!
(13.5.1991)
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18
Dearest Josef,
Minna and I are delighted to get your letter and are truly relieved to learn that your blood-trouble was such as to let you go home for the week-end. We pray to the Divine Mother to make you normal soon. I thank you for your renewal of subscription to Mother India plus your donation. It is indeed a generous gesture.
It must have been a big surprise to you that when everything was ready for the yearly flight to our Pondicherry Ashram you had to be whisked off to a Vienna hospital. But for those whose heartbeats are a japa of the names of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother all happenings turn into gifts from God bringing the devotee closer to the eternal Light and Love in various ways.
Those words of mine on the phone - "Our love is with you" - sprang without a deliberate thought. They were a proof that there's always a deep warmth within us enfolding our far-away friend and as a fellow-follower of our Divine Guides he is a part of their own golden presence in our lives -a presence which is well described in the words of a poet as "closer to us than breathing and nearer than hands and feet".
I am so pleased that the June Mother India was brought to you by your wife to be your companion in the hospital and that it happened to carry my letter to you of November 1990 as the very first item in "Life - Poetry- Yoga". It must have reassured you that no matter what happens, the grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is always with everyone of us and is invariably carrying us onward and inward and upward to their own Perfection which for all its ever-full sublimity and felicity never fails to brim over with sweetness and solicitude for us earthlings.
Most appropriately too this issue of Mother India brought back to your mind that Master Mantra from the Mother when
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you keenly needed to be told that Sri Aurobindo always stood as your "refuge", welcoming you to those Guru-feet of his that have touched the dust of our earth. They have blessed this dust and made themselves at the same time our guardians and the bearers of all those who cling to them towards the goal of the world's evolutionary pilgrimage.
(19.6.1991)
Note of june 27
I learned by a phone-call from Austria that our cherished friend - a lovely man all round - had passed away soon after receiving my letter as well as a letter from another of his intimate friends in the Ashram: Dimitri. He was only 56 years old.
I may note that the mantra Sri Aurobindo sharanam mama -"Sri Aurobindo is my refuge" - was given by the Mother to be repeated a hundred and twenty times as the sole last rite at the cremation or burial of Sri Aurobindo's disciples. It is significant that Josef should have picked it out for himself in his final days.
Josef was found suffering from uncheckable internal bleeding.
1 am extremely sorry that you are not well. Fever, nervousness, weakness - all these troubles cut to my heart and make me wonder what I should do to help. As soon as I read of them I concentrated on our Divine Mother and put them into her hands - those ready recipients, both graceful and gracious, of all our troubles. I am glad that you are not such a defeatist as to run to your bed each time there is an indisposition but are sitting in your chair and even moving about. When you tell me that you value my letter so much as to put in on your chest I feel deeply touched. Of course the worth of
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my letter - if any - is not due to my own small self: the communication has worth only inasmuch as this small self can be a little opening through which my adoration of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wafts towards you something of their sublimating, strengthening and soothing presence.
I am quite curious to know how my enlarged photo must be looking with all the loving tricks you play on it. If you hadn't said that the photo is framed (and therefore has a glass over it), I would have been startled to read that you had put some kumkum on my forehead! I like the idea of your putting a small picture of Sri Aurobindo on my chest to show how the manifest Lord is held in my heart. Yes, he is always there, but, as I have said in some letter, my feeling whenever I have knelt at the Samadhi has been that rather than Sri Aurobindo being in my heart tiny Amal is in the mighty heart of Sri Aurobindo. The Master is too big to be contained within his diminutive disciple. That is the ultimate reality, as the Mother hinted to me when I once told her of my feeling. But actually she was speaking in qualitative terms figured in terms of quantity. Quantitatively the Supreme is infinite not exclusively in extension: He is infinite in essence, as much a plenitude of presence in an atom as in a galaxy. Largeness or smaller than smaliness - a paradoxical way of putting its transcendence of all measurement. The same paradox is expressed more concretely in those four familiar lines of Blake:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour. ..
Transposed to another universe of discourse, the fact of the essential Divinity being formulable anywhere is thrust
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home to us by Sri Aurobindo when he wants us to break through the illusion that the world of gross-seeming Matter on which all other-worldly philosophy has frowned is really incapable of manifesting perfection. According to Sri Aurobindo, the fulfilment of us earthlings is finally at the two ends of existence - the Supermind bearing in itself the truth of both eternity and time at one extreme and at the other the terrestrial scene where all truth appears to be lost so that Sri Krishna of the Gita could say to Arjuna: "Thou who hast come to this transient and unhappy world, turn thy love to Me." Sri Aurobindo, in his poem "The Life-Heavens" sees man's consummation ultimately in a full embodiment of the Divine on the terrestrial scene. To one who has wandered into the alluring excitements of the "roseate cloud-fire" with its thrilling yet limited "sweetness of heaven-sense", what in Savitri is called "the Paradise of the Life-Gods", a sudden reminder rises from the earthly depths which he has abandoned. The reminder is at once of the Supramental Truth-Consciousness and of the seeming abyss in which man's evolution has been set. It is "Earth's outcry to the limitless Sublime". The last part of it runs:
"I, Earth, have a deeper power than Heaven;
My lonely sorrow surpasses its rose-joys,
A red and bitter seed of the raptures seven; -
My dumbness fills with echoes of a far Voice.
"By me the last finite, yearning, strives
To reach the last infinity's unknown,
The Eternal is broken into fleeting lives
And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone."
Plato long ago intuited that on a high plane beyond ours there subsisted ideal forms, which he called archimages, of all things that are part of the flux of time. These things can merely approximate, distantly reflect, those idealities. That is because Plato made a distinction between the real world and
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the shadow world. And this distinction has held for all dreamers and aspirants as well as for philosophers and moralists. The aim of life has been visioned as the contact between the real world and the shadowy through an "imprisoned splendour", the "soul" which belongs to the former but has fallen into the latter and got trapped there. In Sri Aurobindo's eyes, the soul has deliberately come below and to him what is dubbed the shadowy world is one where the soul has to work out a divine manifestation. Not just to reflect but to incarnate the idealities - not to run away to join them but to draw them down here is its job, its true mission. But the question confronts it: "How can a genuine incarnation of the idealities be possible if life in matter is something different in its very stuff from them?" Unless the stuff is basically the same, the attempt will always fall short.
In however hidden a way, material life has to be divinity itself, for else the idealities will never be earth-existence altogether. As the lines I have quoted from "The Life-Heavens" show, Sri Aurobindo finds Godhead concealed in its entirety within the series of "fleeting lives" and within the very clay of which we are made. The idealities are all biding their hour in the obscurities of matter. We cannot at present reach them or open a clear pathway for them to emerge. But we can prepare for their emergence in some fabulous future. The means of this preparation is to hark to Sri Aurobindo's summons to change not only the inner being but also the outer. The day-to-day person in us has to live in the light of the soul. A consecrated consciousness should be ours with a sense of the Divine from within us coming forth, through all thinking and feeling and speaking and doing, to meet the Divine who is everywhere around and above and below — yes, even below, waiting to be recognised in dumb material things. Of course, this should not blur our perception of the diversity of instruments - we have to deal differently with persons and occasions, using common sense and tact and specific understanding - but all through we must still have the awareness of a secret divinity and whatever instrument
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we face and whatever occasion we meet must appear to us a veil from behind which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are communicating with us. By keeping them always within subtle sight we shall him everything into an opportunity of knowing their will in the world and of variously fulfilling it.
You are lucky to have "subtlle sight" in a special mode. Not only do you have darshan of guiding powers in trance: you get visions of them also with open eyes. You say that from" 1980 Sri Aurobindo and Mother Mira have deeply entered your life. Let your concentration on them keep increasing. Let them be the central presence. If the arrival of a fellow-disciple like me in 1986 has helped to make them more and more close and vivid, I am indeed pleased and feel that my friendship has borne fruit. You have paid many compliments to me: they are most sincere and I truly appreciate them, especially your sense that I am a messenger of the Great Reality that my Gums are. If you see any light in me, it is meant essentially to lead on to the Superb Source of it and be to your visionary eyes at best no more than
A golden temple-door to things beyond.
It should also serve to show by whatever genuineness there may be in it what the touch of my Gums can do with even the most difficult stuff ever brought to their onward-leading feet and their upward-bearing hands. For 1 came to them with a very complicated and critical mind looking in various mutually conflicting directions and with a sensuous nature over-keenly responsive to a myriad lures indicated by that old Christian formula: "the world, the flesh and the devil." Through such a problematic ensemble a speck or spark of some strange dream sought to work its way into the outer life. It was encouraged to come forward by two calls. One was the diversely sensitive "poet's eye" discerning a persistent beauty in earth's transiences, a beauty which drew near only to beckon me to some incomprehensible farness. The other call was a contact with a girl who was as simple as I was
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complex but had a beauty lit by an intimate touch on what had been to me an elusive distance.
When the wonder-struck poet kindled into a lover whose object of affection had already heard the flute of Krishna, something awoke in him relating itself not only to the human charm in front but also to a Beyond in that charm. Then the search for the Unknown linked the two beings as much as what their eyes delighted in. This search brought them together to the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, and the great Path they shared in common as companion-pilgrims put an end to their old passion. Sri Aurobindo wrote to me: "...it was through the psychic element in both that you were united to her, the connection that was formed on the way to the Divine and led to your both coming here, after which its utility ceased to exist." .
(20.6.1991)
You don't seem to have been a careful reader of my long-continued series "Life - Poetry - Yoga". Otherwise you would not have written: "If my letter will disturb your contemplative mood, I may be excused." Two words here are rather inapt. First, "disturb". Even when people unexpectedly come to my door and say out of politeness: "We hope we are not disturbing you", I sometimes say: "What you are saying is hardly a compliment to me. Do you think I am so easily disturbed?" Time and again in my articles I have written that I try to practise equanimity - along with the formula "Remember and Offer". A letter - and that too from a cherished friend - is surely very far from being anything like an earthquake, however minor. Perhaps a full-fledged Yogi, which I am not yet, would not be disturbed even by an earthquake: he might -meet it by a mirthquake on his part, though that would possibly be a super-manifestation of Ananda rather than of peace.
The second erring term is "contemplative". It would hardly be correct to picture Amal Kiran in any pose even
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vaguely resembling the Greek image of an Indian Yogi's occupation: "omphaloskepsis" - "contemplation of the navel". One of the impressions my articles are bound to create is that their author rarely sits in regular meditation or concentration: mostly he is doing something - reading or writing or typing or speaking or else walking a bit lest his already poor legs should atrophy. Amal Kiran's life is spent in what he has called "unplanned sadhana". There is no regime of regular "in-going" by means of notable sessions. This Aurobindonian is generally posed midway between "ingoing" and "out-going" - his attempt is at a gathered-up consciousness with open eyes, living in the sacred presence of the Master and the Mother by a constant evocation of the memory of them and laying imaginatively in their hands or at their feet all his actions - and, if he is caught off his guard, all his reactions to unpleasant outer circumstances. So to refer to him as being in what is commonly understood as "contemplative mood" bespeaks a somewhat inattentive reading of his monthly publication of "personal letters".
Most probably you'll be surprised at my making such ado about a conventional apologetic phrase. But you must make allowance for the cacoethes scribendi which is the pedantic equivalent of the "itch of writing" - a practised writer's eagerness to find an occasion to indulge in the art of words -hopefully to some original effect.
You have mentioned the importance of the month of June for you, since it contains the 26th, the date on which in 1969 our Mother is said by you to have directly intervened and saved you during your first operation. The exact date, but in 1938, is also memorable for me. In one of her talks, without mentioning my name, the Mother has spoken of what happened to me. According to her, by all ordinary standards I should have died, the heart should have stopped - if there had not been in the being an immediate cry for help, a cry which the Mother said was due to a habitual all-time turn of the consciousness to her. In one of the talks recorded by Nirodbaran, Sri Aurobindo said that I had been saved
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from death by a divine intervention.
Your question - "Why are you so silent about the Samadhi?" - has set me off on a shining trail. What did you want me to say? My appeals to the Mother on behalf of my friends go on as usual. But your use of the word "silent" is quite suggestive. One can't help being silent in connection with the Samadhi - not only because the qualities of this holy place exceed one's power of speech but also because the Samadhi essentially represents the power of silence. Mind my expression: with silence I have associated power. Such an association is most apt in relation to Sri Aurobindo. As he had withdrawn into the solitude of his room after the end of 1926 to concentrate on his spiritual work, and put the Mother in the forefront to deal with his disciples from day to day, we were physically in his presence on only four special occasions in the year and naturally there was silence during them. But, unlike a Yogi like Ramana Maharshi sitting quietly for hours and diffusing intense peace, Sri Aurobindo keeping silent filled us with what I may indicate by inverting a mantric line from his "Life-Heavens" thus:
Rest one with unimaginable Force.
It was as if we were stilled into a deep surrender to a Divine Presence that irresistibly carried us forward on the path of Perfection. This Presence is well hit off by the paradox in that stanza from Sri Aurobindo's "Jivanmukta", a poem on the Vedantic ideal of the living liberated man about which he noted: "Perhaps I have given a pull towards my own ideal which the strict Vedantin would consider illegitimate." The stanza runs:
A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish,
Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters,
A single might of luminous quiet Tirelessly bearing the world and ages.
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What I mean by the extraordinary element in Sri Aurobindo may be most pointedly driven home by my feeling when I first looked at his body after he had left it on December 5, 1950.1 marked that there was nothing like what people usually speak of when they stand before someone dead. They refer to the expression of peace on the face. I saw the very opposite. Certainly not any stamp of agitation but the unmoving source of a sovereign dynamism. A tremendous power seemed to emanate from the face and figure. Wave after wave of it filled the room and surrounded me. I perceived an overwhelming air of Conquest. A king was taking his siesta after a supreme victory. From the flaring nostrils to the way in which the legs were stretched out, slightly apart, there was a natural aspect of domination. Spontaneously, effortlessly an assertion of empire could be experienced. Here was a silence, transcendent of all creation - an ultimate absolute of the ineffable - from which had originally flowed forth a creative energy and which now was sending out a power of re-creating all life. Such was the mysterious death of Sri Aurobindo. And it is this fount of new life that is enshrined in the Samadhi at the centre of the Ashram courtyard.
A most holy hush of infinite grace by whose radiant omnipotence of love everything could be blessed into an outgrowing of old forms that have become fetters - this is the Samadhi where both the Master and the Mother are laid - his casket the support of Hers, as it were, and both together symbolising a silence with the power to put an end to all past failures, to remove our futile frettings and unobtrusively, without the fanfare of even one word, bring about the beginnings of an earth discovering its own hidden divinity. There is nothing to be wondered at in one's being "so silent about the Samadhi" if one's wordless state reflects in however distant a measure the almighty secret hinted in that flower-decked incense-wreathed monument from where our Two Adored Ones waft to us mutely the message: "We are always with you!"
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After this paean do not run away with the idea that one has to be within physical reach of the Samadhi all the time if not spend all one's hours sitting in front of it. No doubt, the Ashram has a special spiritual virtue, it is the central powerhouse of the Aurobindonian Yoga because here the Master and the Mother lived and their "material envelopes", sanctified by the lives led in them, are preserved. But the Master and the Mother were essentially realities of consciousness and it is with our consciousness that fundamentally we have to be in contact with them. Just as on darshan days people came to Pondicherry from all over the earth, so too some physical touch with the resting-place of the Avatars' bodies is needed, but to conjure up the silence of the Samadhi within our souls is the basic need.
(8.6.1991)
Your mother must have passed on to you my comments on your poems as well as on what attitude to take towards the poet in you. Every poet should have the urge to write, as Meredith said, "our inmost in the sweetest way". By "sweetest" he did not mean mere elegance of expression or pleasing musicality: he had in mind the search for the beauty and harmony of the revealing word which gives at the same time the precise shape and impact, as it were, of the theme and an "aura" of suggestion beyond the apparent line and hue and thrill. There is, of course, no one single way of realising the Meredithian ideal. One may be exquisite as in Coleridge's
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness,
or grand as in the same poet'
The alien shine of unconcerning stars
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or one may progressively lead from the one mode to the other through what may be termed a subtlety of descriptive insight as in the closing passage of this very poet's "Frost at Midnight";
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee.
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Admittedly, these instances belong to an old though never to be out-dated tradition. The modem temperament is more nervous, less patient in its poetic responses and naturally the technique tends to lose something of the steadiness and regularity and sequential movement, but this is no defect in itself, provided the "inmost" a la Meredith is at play and the aesthetic sense, set to however new a pattern, is not coarsened. Actually an anticipation of true modem poetry in quintessence is in the strange successions and tempo-changes of "Kubla Khan" 's kaleidoscopy and I am glad that this poem has gripped your imagination no less than the researching intellect in you. You certainly have a genuine poet breaking through your young, slightly rebellious days and I see the magic and the mystery floating even across the semi-serious charm of the face in the photo of "The Three Graces", as I would call it, which I have received: your wonderful mother with a daughter standing on either side.
(10.9.1986)
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19
Your name was on my lips for a few days before your recent letter reached me. I said to myself: "I have told B to keep me in touch with her health. Somehow I feel a little concerned." I am indeed sorry that the dreaded backache has returned. Maybe, as you surmise, when it had gone, you exploited your good luck too much by taking up normal daily work at home. You have to be rather careful and not push yourself. I am sure the body will again respond to the Mother's grace. Don't think, as you may tend to do, that she wants the body to suffer in order that your soul may come nearer to her!
One can always use one's bodily ailments as an opportunity to intensify one's call to her. But surely she does not wish to repeat the old Christian asceticism which welcomes pain as the best imitatio Christi and therefore the quickest path to salvation. A welcome to suffering entered the Indian mind too during the last century - most probably owing to the influence of Christian missionaries. But it is no real part of Indian spirituality. You may ask: "Isn't there the term tapasya meaning 'penance'?" I may assure you that this translation is a mistake and is most probably due to the Christian missionaries' influence.
"Penance" goes with a strong sense of "sin", especially the so-called "original sin" which is typically a Christian notion. According to St. Paul, God's sinless son Jesus came to suffer crucifixion as a sacrifice to cleanse men of the taint of the sin of disobedience which Adam had committed and which one who inherited its taint and went on sinning further had no power to wipe off. The Indian tapasya derives from the root tapa which literally means "heat" and figuratively stands for a directed intensity of consciousness or a fiery concentration of energy. And Yogic aspirants of a certain type go in for severe bodily discomfort in order to prove the power of mind over matter, a masterful independence of the body by the soul. But normally tapasya does not
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call for aberrations like keeping one arm lifted for years or lying on a bed of nails.
Philosophically, the term should go back to what Sri Aurobindo has added to the old formula sat-chit-ananda -existence, consciousness, bliss - describing the ultimate reality which is a threefold oneness. This formula may connote the Absolute as self-enclosed with no necessary bearing on the "relativities" of phenomenal experience. There need be no creative suggestion in it, so that phenomenal experience may even be conceived as having no basis in the ultimate reality and so may be considered "illusory". Sri Aurobindo's addition to the ancient formula is the word tapas. He speaks not simply of chit but of chit-tapas, "consciousness-force", suggesting "activity" and therefore "creativity" as inherent in "consciousness". Thus the creation of worlds by the Divine out of Himself is a natural act and automatically confers reality - however phenomenal and secondary - on them. The Supreme is both Brahman and Ishwara, God no less than the Absolute.
And through this vision Sri Aurobindo goes even beyond the usual theistic concept. The God inherent in the Absolute, exercising his consciousness-force, implies a shaping power which organises a set of ideal forms, a multiplicity of interrelated causes of our world but also a perfect original into whose image this world can be called upon to turn in the long evolutionary run. So the possibility of an all-round transformation is indicated by the very nature of ultimate things. This shaping power Sri Aurobindo designates as vijna-na or supermind or truth-consciousness, a fourth term accompanying his new triple formula.
You speak of boring me with your backache. I am afraid I have bored you with a complex Absolute at the back of an aching universe. So I shall cut short my cackle about the transcendent and the cosmic. But I'll be inwardly busy with them and link them with my beloved friend's well-being -especially at the Samadhi. You have been more than repaying my heart's turn towards you by your most touching and
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and undreamable sentence: "After the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's gracious names full of their Grace, I like to add your amiable 'Amal'." I understand why you bring in my name. You feel the divine help coming at the same time directly from your Gurus and indirectly through Amal's intense daily petition on your behalf. But I am sure you say my name some distance away from those two mighty mantric appellations. To the latter's enfolding greatness your heart must be moving vertically - to the former's loving littleness it must be getting linked horizontally.
(12.7.1991) .
You have written: "Would you resolve one problem of mine? There is this apparent contradiction between Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's words. Sri Aurobindo says, 'Reject the false notion that the divine Power will do and is bound to do everything for you at your demand... do even the surrender for you' while the Mother says, '...you have nothing to do, you have only to allow the Lord to do everything. And He does everything... It is so wonderful.' "
There is no contradiction here, not even an "apparent" one. You have focused on the first part of the Mother's statement and not let the second part shed light on the first and have its effect. Allowing the Lord to do everything is an act expected from you: it is you who have to allow Him -activity and not passivity is demanded of you at the start. Later too, the activity has to go on in order to make you passively lie in His wonder-working hands. This amounts to Sri Aurobindo's reminder of "the false notion that the divine Power will... do even the surrender for you". What the Mother asks is a total whole-hearted putting of ourselves at the Lord's feet and receiving His grace and guidance rather than following all the time the way of strenuous personal effort. But "the sunlit path" indicative of the inmost soul's emergence and self-consecration is not reached at a bound and some labour of a daily gesture of love is required.
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Your other question is about the significance, in spiritual terms, of a sadhak's birthday. You ask: "Would it so happen that the decisive and path-breaking advance on the date, as suggested by the Mother, will take place inevitably or does it also depend on one's aspiration and opening at that moment of the year?" The Mother has spoken of a creative rhythm repeating itself on one's birthdays making one specially receptive and plastic on each such occasion and she has wished us to take advantage of this cyclic grace. Evidently one has to put oneself in the right frame of mind and be open to receive the gift waiting for one. I would like to add what I think the best way to avail oneself of the occasion's boon. It is to regard every day as our birthday and aspire for God's bounty, His gift to us of His own self, His leaning with all His love towards His child. Then the special rush of sweetness and light on the anniversary of our birth will be most easily received. Even if we are not able to recognise the special rush, we should not worry provided we have quietly prepared for it throughout the year. If there has been the preparation it is bound to take effect sooner or later. "Readiness is all."
(12.7.1991)
I am indeed surprised to know from you the way I entered your life. It is highly significant that my entry should be connected with Sri Aurobindo's book on the Gita and with your vision of him. You say that you read the book in the morning when you were in despair and in the evening you sat in an easy-chair under a tree of yellow flowers and suddenly our Master became visible, with the words: "We are with you. You are our Amal Kiran." Your letter follows up this piece of information with: "I had never heard this name before or read any book of yours. I asked what Amal Kiran meant. Then the vision and voice stopped. Afterwards I got a list of books from SABDA and there was one book in a Gujarati translation: Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran.
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Struck by that name I put an order for the book. In it there were talks also by Nirodbaran. When I read yours I felt 'Amal Kiran was my brother in a past birth.' I wondered what he would be in the present. This was at the end of 1983 or the beginning of 1984. Afterwards in 1986, by the grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, we got in touch with each other by means of letters and you accepted me as your little sister and student."
The words you heard - "We are with you. You are our Amal Kiran" - are a bit of a puzzle. They can only be understood in a super-mystical sense. I interpret them thus: "The soul we have named 'Amal Kiran', meaning 'The Clear Ray', will be so mingled with your life that just as we consider and feel him to be ours, you will take him to be your own and thus get identified with him and we shall take you as our child as if you were one with him. Soon you will realise this truth: we have already foreseen it. In showing you the shape of things to come, we are hinting to you our intimacy with your soul - an intimacy you will recognise when Amal Kiran appears in your life and you will know that having him as our child could be as though you were the same. The meaning of his name - the ideal to which he has been intended to rise in order best to unite with us, the ideal of combining a pervading clarity and a suffusing radiancy whereby there can be not only far-sight and in-sight but also a steady warmth and a quiet glow in the being with an intuition of the love and light of the Divine Presence everywhere - the many-aspected meaning of his name could be for you as it is for him a pointer and a guide to the goal, at once time-transcending and time-transforming, which we have attempted to make time-transparent through the labour and laughter of our 'Integral Yoga'."
You are right in- seeing me as "absorbed" in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and as telling you to draw help at all times from them. I am absorbed not only to the exclusion of common mundane attractions, though I do not look down my nose at their play in the lives of people in general. I am
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absorbed also In the sense that I exclude even other spiritual influences from the world's past and present. Not that I fail to recognise their historical relevance or the gifts they bring today. I never do hot-gospelling on behalf of my Masters. When the opportunity arises for me to speak up I do so as fully and devotedly as I can and, if necessary, make comparisons with other paths of spiritual vision and practice. The comparisons are made not out of missionary zeal and with a one-track mind. I have sincerely studied what the great religions have to offer at their highest.
Judaism's fervent energetic self-dedication to its grandiose all-demanding God, Zoroastrianism's call for a purity of prayer like a fire rising up to an overarching Truth-supporting Divinity and for a smiling service to one's fellow Truth-lovers in need, Christianity's ardour for a World-Saviour sent by a Deity of justice and mercy to a sinful mankind through a miraculous virgin birth and insisting on works of charity and on converting by all means possible the whole of mankind to faith in that one and only and exclusive Son of God, Mohamedanism's urge of forceful obedience to an all-commanding Master of the world who sharply distinguishes between the faithful and the unbeliever, Vaishnav-ism's sweep of passionate devotion towards a Lord of Love variously and endlessly at play in the cosmic movement, Tantricism's surge towards a World-Mother fighting earth's evils and towards a raising of all desires in her direction, Taoism's sense of a simple universal basis of being which can always rightly uphold and lead one along paths of peace. Buddhism's grand escape into an infinite silence from the mind's "labyrinthine ways" and the wandering urgencies of the little heart, Vedanta's plunge into a boundless Self of selves ever free and serene in its eternity behind the march of the ages - all these turns of the searching human soul I have studied with sympathy. But I found them all insufficient and some of them narrow in attitude when I stood in the presence of Sri Aurobindo and his gracious co-worker whom his disciples hailed as the Divine Mother incarnate.
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Such intimate knowledge of the world-process, such illumined understanding of human nature, such evocation of the inmost soul to suffuse the commonest activity, such invocation of a supreme Light and Love from a transcendent Reality to awaken that Reality's own hidden counterpart in ignorant mind and stumbling life-energy and imperfect material existence, such depth and dynamism of spirituality and occult science as I discovered to be quietly put in action by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from their poise in what they designated as "Supermind" I had never come across anywhere. No wonder I am "absorbed" in these two personalities who struck me as having brought forth some most ancient secret which the Rishis of the prehistoric Rigveda seemed to have caught glimmers of and which took account of a most modern insight like the vision of an evolutionary earth and which considered as its natural milieu the complex field of progressive life today looking for a fulfilment of terrestrial values rather than a withdrawal from them.
Only two figures from the long train of past sages, saints, yogis, prophets, avatars are in my view- most affined to the Aurobindonian Era of the Integral Yoga. One is Sri Krishna of the magic flute capturing the whole world's heart as well as Sri Krishna of the wide-visioned Gita in the war-chariot at Kurukshetra - Sri Krishna who revealed himself to Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Jail and later secretly commanded him to leave British-ruled Calcutta first for French-ruled Chandernagore and then for Pondicherry, the capital of French India. The other figure is Sri Ramakrishna of our own time with his manifold sadhana having a tremendous central motive-force in what Sri Aurobindo has called the psychic being, the soul in the inmost heart, and stressed as the greatest mover in his own Yoga - Sri Ramakrishna who after his death appeared to Sri Aurobindo on three occasions in connection with Yogic workings and whose chief mouthpiece Swami Vivekananda paid a visionary visit, day after day for a fortnight, to Sri Aurobindo in the Alipore Jail pointing beyond the mental consciousness towards the
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"overhead" planes whose culmination is the earth-fulfilling Supermind realised and rendered operative for the first time by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
Apropos of the Aurobindonian Supermind it is quite interesting to me that you in your simple-hearted admiration of me should have written: "My dear brother's thoughts are like those of great sages - like Plato's thinkings." How did Plato of all "sages" swim into your ken? From my boyhood I have had a strong affinity with ancient Greece. Even in my school-days 1 delved with intense joy into the Socratic dialogues of Plato - the shorter ones: Crito, Phaedo, Apologia and Symposium. In the B.A. of Bombay University 1 had the pleasure of taking Philosophy Honours with Plato's Republic for special study. When I came to the Ashram, the Mother once told me that in a past life I had been an ancient Athenian. Later Sri Aurobindo, in reference to his general "impressions" about my past Lives, mentioned the time of the European Renaissance and the period in England called the Restoration. He took care to say these were only impressions, not intuitions. But he affirmed that there was not the slightest doubt about my having lived in ancient Athens. Somehow I never was curious as to who exactly I had been in that wonderful centre of the intellect's search for truth and beauty and goodness, the theme of Pindar's celebrated lines:
O shining white and famed in song and violet-wreathed,
Fortress of Hellas, glorious Athens, city of God!
Whoever I may have been, I feel it in my bones that I had very much to do with the Platonic circle around Socrates. I have heard from Nolini that Sri Aurobindo was Socrates. It should, therefore, be no surprise that I would imaginatively be so much at home in that circle. What is of special relevance in relation to your likening my thoughts to Plato's thinkings is that the foundation of Plato's metaphysics which was laid, according to him, by Socrates is an intuition that links up with Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision of what we may term First and Last Things.
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Sri Aurobindo's First Things in relation to the cosmos are the Supermind's perfect originals of the mind-vitality-body complex which has evolved as the human unit in the course of time. Mis Last Things are to be here amongst us: a mind which possesses truth instead of questing for it, a life-force which is a master-builder charged with inexhaustible vigour rather than a dreaming desire which strains after its goals and trips up again and again on the way, a physical organism completely harmonious, shapely, secure in place of one seeking health and beauty and longevity but with a flesh which is, as Shakespeare's Hamlet saw, heir to a thousand ills and doomed finally to degenerate and die. In manifestation the Last Things can be as the First because "evolution" is only the gradual outbreak of a Supermind buried in utter "involution" at an opposite pole to Supermind in full flower in a luminous transcendence. A divine pressure mysteriously from above and a divine push secretly from below are the history of our world. The Socratic Plato gbmpsed a realm of divine models or "archimages" beyond this world and perceived at the base of the cosmos an undifferentiated flux of being which is almost like non-being. Upon this flux a creative Power which he named the Demiurge (the Divine Workman) imposes reflections of the ideal forms that are above and he turns the lower chaos into an orderly universe. But as the forms themselves are never present below in their pristine power either by descent or by a hidden "involution" in the chaotic flux, there can be no future of perfection for travailing earth - only splendid yet evanescent spurts of God's light. Like ancient Athens.
However, the intuition of a perfect world above throwing a shining shadow of itself below is a triumph of philosophical thought which Plato alone has achieved in some anticipation of Sri Aurobindo's vision.
Am I taxing your mind too much? Forgive me for being carried away by my enthusiasm at your breathing the name of Plato. Indeed the very word "enthusiasm" has a Platonic air and should be appropriate in this context. I remember Sri
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Aurobindo writing: "What we mean by inspiration is that the impetus to poetic creation and utterance comes to us from a superconscient source above the ordinary mentauty... That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken." Literally the term means: "entry by a God."
The poetic enthousiasmos blows often through Plato's prose. He was an artist in language and not only a fashioner of philosophy. There is the saying: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, it would be in the Greek of Plato." How particular he was for the right order of vocables and the sovereign rhythm of their combination may be judged from the fact that he wrote seven versions of the first sentence of his Republic before he struck the note that satisfied him. I am also a stickler after the correct expository or revelatory form in my writings.
(23.7.1991)
The quotations you have given me from Shankara under the general caption "Dangerous Wealth"1 are not devoid of sense, but properly considered they are not against money as such but against the "crazy pursuit of wealth, earning it, hoarding it or spending it" and against the "keenness of ego-glorification" and "the greed of misers". They also have the ideal of sannyasa (renunciation) in mind and, after saying that "one cannot hope to achieve liberation through wealth", assert: "The truly great souls... take recourse to solitude far from the madding crowd after renouncing their unwanted wealth". For those who do not or cannot follow the ideal of sannyasa Shankara says: "When one is without wealth, one is able to lead a carefree and peaceful life: one, rid of (unnecessary) wealth, is most respected in all company. He need not fear robbers, the wicked or the rulers (revenue-collecting agents). He can lead a happy Hfe under any circumstances, whereas the wealthy are ever agitated and are
1. The Indian Express, Madras, May 19, 1991.
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constantly afraid of their own children and, therefore, suffer from chronic anxieties." Surely, these words are not a plea for poverty or non-possession of money? The poor may not fear robbers, the wicked or the rulers but they have other anxieties: for example, how to get sufficient food for themselves and their families or have sufficient and comfortable space for living? Here is a life not at all happy because of lack of money. What Shankara opposes is "the mad pursuit of wealth" and he rightly warns: "Surprisingly, even virtuous persons get addicted to the pursuit of wealth and prosperity, thereby losing their power of discrimination of what is good and bad."
As I have remarked, Shankara's ideas are not without sense and they certainly do not advocate poverty for those who have no call to sannyasa. An adequate amount of money is implied to be a good thing. Of course, even here it is implied that one should not be attached to whatever one has. I find the expression "inner harmony" in one of the quotations. It is a good starting-point for considering the attitude of our Gurus - Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - to the problem of money in general and of wealth in particular. .
Their stress primarily is on the inner condition. There has to be peace and poise in the being and this peace and poise must cover all items of one's being and one's life. That means no lopsidedness, no contradiction between one part and another; in short, harmony has to prevail. Inner harmony naturally involves a balanced outlook. In the case of money-matters there would be no stress on extremes but at the same time the inner balance would see even the point of extremes and, if necessary, accept them. In other words, a wide equanimity which keeps a calm equal attitude to everything and on the basis of it appreciates with a free mind and heart the plus and minus of all occasions.
As regards money-making in general, Sri Aurobindo has said that it is not wrong to do business honestly and, by gaining reasonable profit, to reach a fairly flourishing state. Referring to himself, he says that he could well conceive of
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himself as receiving an Mesh, a divine command, to do business and if such an adesh had come he would have gone in for business; business as such has nothing contradictory to the Divine's purpose in the world. There is nothing intrinsically unspirituai in being in a flourishing condition or even becoming wealthy, provided honesty is not sacrificed and miserbness not developed.
Refusing to believe, as Shankara did, that in the ultimate vision the world is an illusion or a delusion, neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother accepts "the refusal of the ascetic" to grant material life a final goal, just as they do not accept "the denial of the materialist" to accord a reality to a "soul" or "spirit" exceeding material life and serving as its very basis and as the reason of its existence. Since money is an important force at work in the field of the spirit's manifestation and of the soul's evolutionary expression, our Gurus do not turn their faces away from it or look down their noses at it. They put an emphasis on the right means of making money as well as on the right perception in using it. To those who take fully to the Integral Yoga, their advice is to dedicate to its cause the money earned. But here also there are no cut-and-dried rules. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother judge each set of circumstances according to their insight into its truth and they make and break rules in the light of this insight. They have allowed and even approved various types of financial relationships between themselves and their followers, but they have always insisted on an inner self-consecration and the correct working out of whatever relationship has been established - a working out in which the remembrance of them is never absent and in which one always feels that they are looking at1 us. The money is essentially theirs: we are only its trustees.
As a broad guide-line for their disciples there cannot be a better quotation than the following from Sri Aurobindo: "The ideal sadhaka in this kind is one who if required to Uve poorly can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the full inner play of the divine consciousness,
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and if he is required to live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates."
On my own, keeping in view the background of all that has been said so far, 1 may sum up with an epigram: "There is nothing fundamentally wrong in possessing wealth, but it is a fall from grace if one is possessed by wealth."
(19.5.1991)
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20
I have been hearing from certain quarters time and again that our Yogic work at present is to divinise our physical cells. No doubt, the divinisation of the body, so that it becomes immune to disease, decrepitude and even death, is the crown of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga of the Supramental Descent and Transformation. To keep this climax in view and to create an eagerness and readiness in the body for it, so that the physical cells may open to the transformative Supermind, is nothing in itself to be scorned as mere fantasy and megalomania. But can their divinisation ever be achieved without first enlightening our narrow prejudice-ridden mind, our ambitious restive lust-gripped egoistic Ufe-force, our greedy self-regarding habit-driven ensemble of brain and nerve?
The true soul in the evolutionary mibeu - the psychic being, as Sri Aurobindo terms it - has to emerge and suffuse the rest of our nature with its sense of surrender to God, its sweet calm and its comprehensive compassion, its spontaneous insight into all problems, its constant offering of all work to the Divine. And at the back of this flowering of the deep heart should stand a wide tranquillity of consciousness, an ether of colossal clarity, an all-embracing warmth of wisdom, an ample reservoir of serene strength.
If we haven't got something in us of these states, how can we hope for a divinisation of our cells? We have radiantly to act on them, but how shall we do so except through some light caught from the smile of the inmost soul and from the blissful silence of the universal Spirit, both of them transmitting the glory and grace of the transcendent Supermind? Our chief concentration has to be - as Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never tired of saying - on realising the Divine in our consciousness and on invoking His Will to work in us everywhere.
(9.2.1991)
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Some thoughts and experiences have lately been in some prominence with me and I feel like giving words to my outlook on them. I believe they will have a general bearing and not be solely applicable to my own little concerns.
When anxieties, resentments, frustrations - all leading to obsessive tensions of mind and nerves - are found to persist in spite of our attempt to impose some calm on ourselves, the most natural way to deal with them is to offer them from deep inward to whatever figuration we may have of the Divine. How do we do this? First, a movement outward to the Divine as standing in front of us - a sincere gathering of all the tensions and putting them as if into the hands of a Superhuman Presence. This Presence may be felt as at once a luminous being and a living fire.
In both aspects we are drawn out of ourselves - on the one hand into a beloved Beauty and Power which is a towering reminder to us of unknown summits and, on the other hand, into a golden rapture-rage, as it were, accepting all our dross and carrying it higher and higher without end in an act of purification. We grow aware that our offering, while it begins with an outward flow of mind and heart into some soothing Perfection, fills with the sense of an empyrean overhead from where this Perfection has descended into our midst. Then we feel directly the upward pull. The outward is no longer separate from the upward.
The experience now is not only of a Perfection that soothes: it is also of a Plenitude that simply swallows up our anxieties, resentments, frustrations and completely dissolves them. An entire release, an utter tranquillity, a total loss of the aching self, a freedom without the least drag of what we may poetically term sublunary life are the result. There are no problems any more and we await with a serene smile all that the future may "unfold - or, rather, all that will be worked out by this "voiceless white epiphany" (to use an Aurobindonian phrase) across earth's vicissitudes.
(26.7.1991)
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You have asked me for the best way to approach Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the great Darshan days. According to the Mother's own advice, we must do so with a quiet happiness. This creates a spontaneous receptivity. The state of being quiet makes for a sort of waiting void to fill up with the celestial charity, and the happiness is a sign of being the trustful grateful child of the Divine Light and Love. When we are in this condition, the Divine Light and Love can do what they want and not have to adapt themselves to the half-knowledge we have of our own nature's need.
(29.7.1991)
I'll write to you after a while apropos of your own communications. At the moment I am putting down a most recent experience of mine. I have spoken of its beginning to only one person so far. The whole of it is recorded here for the first time.
On August 3 I was on my way to the Samadhi in the afternoon. The car passed under the Mother's old balcony -the one on the first floor where she used to appear every morning before she permanently took to her second-floor room and would come to a high-up balcony only on special occasions. Looking at the old one I suddenly received a tremendous sense of life's emptiness. It was like a knock-out blow. The physical absence of the Mother whom 1 had daily seen on this balcony was driven home to me like a cosmic catastrophe. Life seemed utterly meaningless without her bodily presence. Never in all these years in the Ashram had such a feeling of desolation come over me. Everything grew worthless. All the literary work I had been doing lost its value totally, Sadhana itself gave the impression of a vacuous process, a plodding on across a desert with only mirages to console me. I said to myself: "Sri Aurobindo went away. Then the Mother left us. Why carry on the burden of a life on an earth where there is no longer that mighty peace and plenitude which was the visible form of Sri Aurobindo, that
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all-enveloping warmth and blessedness which the Mother's palpable figure brought us?"
When I reached the Ashram, I found that the easy passage across which I had daily gone to the Samadhi was under cementing and therefore blocked. So a detour had to be made: a number of hurdles lay in the path of my poor legs now, quite difficult to get over. Friends helped me negotiate them. I accepted the risks because I did not want to accept defeat and go back safely home. "Here is one more setback," I said to myself, "and it makes more pointed the difficulty of facing my life. But, of course, even without any new difficulty, what's the use of breathing in a vacant world?" 1 remembered a phrase in an old poem of mine which had won Sri Aurobindo's admiration:
Thwarted, alone,
We struggle through an atmosphere of stone.
The way back from the Samadhi was less of an obstacle. I came out by another gate. 1 reached home a little soothed after the hour and a half at the Samadhi. Still the void left by a world bare of the Mother no less than of Sri Aurobindo lingered on, deep inside me. Talking to a close friend who is eager to look after me and who had accompanied me, 1 realised that in a special sense the vanity and inanity of the earth must strike forcibly one who has experienced Nirvana. Nirvana would be a grand emptiness, a stupendous disappearance of limitations, an indescribable freedom from the common world, rendering that world barren of significance, a mere spacious shadow in spite of all its teeming contents. In order to know the universe to be a phantom without getting hurt and obsessed by its voidness, must I turn my being to that giant Zero that is yet All? This seemed a desperately splendid remedy. But why jump to such an extreme? And am I capable of it? Is there no other means of getting over the recoil from life? Doubfiess, an easy way out would be to answer with some analogue to the "bare
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bodkin" suggested by the famous situation that faced Hamlet;
To be or not to be - that is the question!
But I am not a violent nature. Besides, as the Mother has said, self-undoing does not - in a perspective of rebirth -solve any problem. Actually, my problem had no particular shape and was not caused by any sharp confrontation of life's hardships. Except for my infirm legs I had nothing to complain of, so far as my own personal day-to-day was concerned. So I went on through a couple of days as calmly as I could. The acute stage had subsided, but the general disappointment did not disappear: it just simmered.
It goes without saying that the first thing I had done when the blow had fallen was to offer to the Mother what I may call my vast world-wound - as 1 do everything that befalls me. At times the answer from her arrives more swiftly than 1 can imagine. At other times I have to wait quietly for the untying of whatever knot has formed. Now there was no response from her that I could discern. Nearly 48 hours had gone since the heart-felt call.
In a most unexpected manner the response came. And it dissolved the knot at one stroke. I was reading some matter given me to edit - part of the series telling how people came to the Ashram. Out of the new story three words stole into my being like soft yet all-sufficient and decisive music and I was wholly my old self again. They were about the Ashram. They simply said: "This divine place,"
Like a master-mantra they filled the entire infinity of my loss with the presence of the Mother. Their childlike note of direct truth evoked in my mind a superb sloka of the Mundaka Upanishad translated by Sri Aurobindo:
"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. All this magnificent universe is nothing but the Eternal."
(4.8.1991)
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Your enlargement of my coloured photo was received with much interest. It is the biggest picture of me I have seen so far and I can mark in it some minute features even. Of course, a mirror would also show them but I rarely halt before a mirror except when something abnormal crops up on the face for special attention. Using an electric shaver I don't need to watch myself regularly every day. Now with your gift immobilising my appearance in a big way in front of me I can't help making a close study. What sort of person is here? Not a strikingly handsome fellow, to be sure - yet perhaps with some particularities plus peculiarities on which one can make significant observations - a general character-reading for your amusement and possibly advantage.
When I ask myself why at all I should bother to make any character-reading, I remember my first darshan of grand Sri Aurobindo, implying also his first darshan of minuscule me! This was on February 21, 1928. I may have recounted the occasion to you already, but here it is appropriate to bring it in. I was a novice in spiritual matters and looked at the Master of the Integral Yoga mainly with the outer sight. I examined his eyes, nose, moustache, mouth, beard and decided that here was a Guru worth accepting. The next day when I met the Mother I eagerly asked her if he had said anything about me. She replied: "Yes. Sri Aurobindo says that you have a good face." I was quite disappointed at having my aspiring soul completely ignored. But later I said to myself: "What else can I expect? I was examining his face and he was examining mine. Indeed tit for tat!" Now glancing back I realise that Sri Aurobindo's remark was the first sign to me of his compassion no less than his humour. He had not refused to give a bit of countenance to my spirituarfuture: he had-granted me some possibility to make good as a disciple of his in however remote a way to come. In any case, is it not a memorable thing for my raw 23-year-old physiognomy to be dubbed favourably in general by the greatest Seer of all time? So, no matter if it lacks striking
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handsomeness, it may not be deemed undeserving of a passing probe.
To begin with: I note that around the pupils of my eyes the not uncommon ring of dark brown fades away into a broad circle of blue. This unusual combination in the iris seems to give the face a twofold look, at once attentive and far-away, earth-tinged and sky-touched - apparently whatever of the poet I have in me and whatever of the Aurobindonian Yogi I strive to be: the visionary of mysterious distances who yet has to be precise in dealing with the many-shaped multi-mooded procession of terrestrial objects. By the way, I must not forget to mention that at the age of eighty-six and nine months my eyes, though bespectacled because of deficient sight, are yet unaccompanied by either "crow's feet" or "bags".
The nose is neither too short and self-involved, as it were, nor too long and inquisitive of others. It has a somewhat curved moderate intrusion into the outer world. Within a bit fleshy rather than elegant knob, the nostrils are a little on the large side, freely breathing the earth's air. Between the nose and the upper lip intervenes a more-than-ordinary space, appearng to suggest that the dip into, and interchange with, the earth's air do not easily affect the mouth's possible disclosure of thought and feeling: the thought and the feeling have a certain independence of traffic with external agencies. The mouth, like the eyes, has a twofold expression. It presents somewhat thin lips, slightly pulled in at the same time that they are faintly smiling, as if there were a self-control which is not so much a discipline as the sense of one's self placed consciously in the power of some blissful Love which can guard and guide. The chin has nothing special about it. It has no particular strength and normally might even betray a tendency to go easy and not be sufficiently assertive or individualistic.
At the other extreme of the face is the fairly high forehead which has become somewhat Shakespearian by a receding hair-line. However, I have escaped what Shakespeare des-
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cribes as his lot in his sonnets which were surely written at the latest in his 'forties since he died at fifty-two:
Against my love shall be as I am now.
With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erwom;
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles...
I see hardly any creases across my forehead. At my age I should be expected to speak like Confucius who, when asked how his brow could show such three deep furrows, answered: "The first reminds me of the gross defects with which my nature was marked from birth. The second recalls the track of great follies across my life. The third represents the stamp on my memory of the terrible ingratitude of friends." Not that I was born less defective in nature or haven't exceeded that master of mandarins in ghastly mistakes or never had cause to cry out like Shakespeare's Amiens'in As You Like It:
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude...
But, having put my brow at the feet of Sri Aurobindo and the Divine Mother, all the lines cut by Karma, my own or those of others, have tended to get wiped off and the being has tried to move assiduously, as near as my frail nature allows, towards the state Sri Aurobindo describes:
I have heard His voice and borne His will
On my vast untroubled brow.
A leap from the sublime-seeming to the ludicrous-looking I have to make in remarking on what the picture discloses on one side of the forehead.,The single ear visible because the face is semi-front does not create any regret in me that I can't
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gaze at its duplicate. If any Mark Antony were to address me as he did the Roman populace and say, "Lend me your ears", I would gladly part with them and not charge the least interest on the loan as there is nothing interesting about them. I hope that what the Upanishads call "the Ear behind the ear", the hidden listener to the universe's subtle hints, the undertones and overtones of cosmic existence, has a prettier configuration.
Enough of comments on "the counterfeit presentment", as Hamlet would have said, of what modern slang would term my "mug". Let me turn to more congenial topics. Apropos of my train of thought following your mention of "Plato's writings" in connection with my letters to you, you refer to my intense liking for Plato and observe that your favourite is Socrates rather than Plato. May I point out that I spoke of Plato's Socratic dialogues? It is the Plato permeated by and suffused with Socrates that has been gloriously close to my mind and heart ever since my school-days. There is also the question: "Can we separate Socrates from the young Plato?" Do we know any substantial Socrates apart from those early dialogues? No doubt, there was Xenophon's report of him, but if we had only this report we would hardly have the wonderfully wise personality whose intellect ranges over all the heights and depths of reality, confronts the acutest problems of human conduct with a smiling keenness, hearkens to the voice of the mysterious daimon within him, a voice from the innermost heart coming as if from a godlike spirit concealed there and so mingling with the movements of the intelligence that the tetter's lines of clear-cut thought run in hidden harmony with the former's spontaneous divinations. Not only Socrates the master-dialectician but also Socrates the revealer of mysteries mounting from visible beauty to the ultimate ineffable Loveliness present to the high-uplifted contemplative consciousness and also the Socrates who built up before the Athenian judges the amazing "Apologia" for his right to die for truth and virtue -where except through the eye and ear of Plato does he come
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alive to us down the ages as the ideal philosopher and the archetypal moralist? We have to speak of the Platonic Socrates no less than of the Socratic Plato. Thus, in the final perspective, you and I may be seen as standing together and when you by way of praise compare my writings to Plato's you really mean the writings of Plato as the door through which Socrates in all his inspired unity and diversity walks out into our midst as he did into the market-place of Athens in the 5th century B.C.
Of course, the Socrates of my "Platonic" writings is Sri Aurobindo. It is he who moves in and out when I write letters to you and others. To quote from my poem "Soul of Song" the last Line:
Haloed with hush he enters, corona'd with calm he goes.
Luckily for the world, unlike Socrates he has communicated with it independently of whatever Plato may mediate his message. I say "luckily" not only because direct interaction is possible but also because nothing can transmit the magnificence and mercy of his light as does his own Word. What we can do is to pass through our disciple-selves some living sense of that light as it operates in one form or another of our human smaliness. A friend or stranger who happens to resemble us may find advantageously focused this or that aspect of the light which may most concern him. Through such an aspect he may get an easier approach to the solar centre of the omnipresent grace that is Sri Aurobindo. All may not be able to face that apocalypse at once. Therein lies the raison d'etre for little kindlings like us to help fellow-aspirants. But always our aim should be to direct all eyes towards the sovereign blaze of revelation and benediction which is - to use Rigvedic language - like a great golden Eye turned from the heavens upon our suffering and our striving. And this aim cannot be truly carried out unless we are more than mere thinkers setting forth to be interpreters: we have first to feel in as many moments as possible a turn
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towards the Master and the Mother in our little hearts as an exquisite ache that is sweeter than all the throbs of pleasure the earth can give.
(6.8.1991)
The inner life lately has been as usual a series of brights and vagues and fortunately no darks except one of an uncommon kind which had nothing to do with my own shortcomings but came like a gigantic thunder-cloud: a sudden overpowering realisation of the Mother's physical absence. I have already written of it to a friend and you'll come to know of it through an instalment of my "Life - Poetry - Yoga". Let me make you the first recipient of a written account of something really fine that happened yesterday - the 17th August -during my afternoon visit to the Samadhi,
Unlike other days, this day found me a Little listless. But at about 5.15, without any preparation a great quiet took possession of my body and a non-descript sound was heard coming from far away and surrounding the still body. Then the body's borders seemed to thin and become open to permeation by a vast Outside. I would call them "trans-fluent" on the analogy of "translucent", for now not light but a flow passed right through me - a flow which appeared to be an inwardly audible passage of the whole universe's movement through my form. The form did not lose its identity, but it was not barriered against the rest of the universe. It was essentially continuous with a huge Existence, a wide Presence of One World steadily advancing -rather an infinite Living Space advancing in Time with a steady faintly heard rhythm. What a sense of freedom and serenity!
Automatically all thinking stopped: no ideas, no images. The universal flow was felt most in the region of the chest, although it was perceived as if at a slight distance in the head as well as in the abdomen. I had to do nothing except sit indrawn to this enormous flux which bore my embodied being
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onward to an unknown but fully trusted future.
Along with the open feeling within to an unlimited uniform sound, there was a kind of effortless isolation from the immediate environment - save for a calmly sympathetic shadow that was the Samadhi. That is why I use the word "in-drawn". And yet this very environment was, without its knowing it, part of the universal flux. It is that lack of knowing, which my body was guarding itself against with an utter ease born of commingling with the tranquil majesty of the flowing Immense into which I had been partly taken up.
When I look back on that rapt quarter of an hour - 5.15 to 5.30 -1 am reminded of the tradition of a sound in which the cosmic consciousness exists: the mantra OM. What I sensed was inseparable from an eternal-seeming rhythm sustained on all sides. Perhaps I would best characterise it as an infinite honeyed hum. Does OM echo this hearing?
(18.8.1991)
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21
Your inquiry about the darshans, in response to my article in the November Mother India, 1990, is such that I feel I have succeeded in putting my very soul into this piece of writing. That is always my aim in writing letters. Even if the subject is intellectual, it should be tackled not with the mere mind but always by the Dweller in the Depths who lives in the light of the Divine Presence at all times. Shouldn't something like this be expected of anyone who has had the supreme luck to have touched the feet of the Master who was a dispeller of all darkness and the feet of the Mother whose smile could heal every wound?
Memorable was the whole series of darshans but perhaps the most memorable was the last on November 24,1950. And here I may speak of a reversal of the roles of the Master's look and the Mother's smile. Now it was the Mother whose look struck me. For even when I was at the door leading to the long passage at whose end was the darshan room, 1 saw her send a keen glance at me and the next moment she bent her head towards Sri Aurobindo and said something to him. Later I learned from her that she had said: "Amal is coming." When I reached the darshan room and stood with folded hands before Sri Aurobindo he started to smile. Never before, during the numerous occasions I had knelt for his blessing or devotedly faced him from a little distance, had he expressed his ever-present grace so pointedly. And I was told by my wife who was with me that he had kept smiling at me even when I had turned to go away.
After December 5 of the same year, the day of his departure from his body, I realised what this unique visible and sustained sign, at once grand and sweet, of his inner intimacy was meant to be. Over years this intimacy had been shown through wonderful letters continued even in the time - the last six years of his Life - when, except with Dilip Kumar Roy, all correspondence had stopped. During those years I
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was away from the Ashram but Sri Aurobindo overlooked the whole distance from Pondicherry to Bombay and sent me some of the most personally warm as well as some of the longest letters (twice covering more than 20 typed sheets). Now I understood that the prolonged smile set an explicit seal on this intimacy by way of a direct personal farewell.
Of course, I am not the only one to receive a farewell-sign. Some others too received it - similarly without understanding it at the moment. It proved clearly that Sri Aurobindo had already resolved upon the parting that he undertook 11 days after the darshan of November 24.
I have said "farewell", but I should rather say "Au revoir" in the essential sense. For, though that prolonged smile was the only unusual gesture towards little me of his endless grace on the physical plane, I have had clear indications of his caring to stoop from his superb Himalayan height to show the same intimacy in various ways from the subtle world closest to the earth, where, according to the Mother and also some dream-glimpses by her disciples, he has taken his stand - until, as the Mother has declared, his work of earth-transformation will be accomplished.
He - and now with him the Mother - will always be close to us. We are likely to forget this assured fact. But time and again come indications of it. And if through my writings I could produce the effect you speak of - "While reading this whole article my eyes were full of tears not out of sorrow but out of love for them and I began to love them more and more as my true father and mother who are always ready to help us, protect us and bless us" - surely I have not failed to impart something of the glorious truth about our Gurus that they are the soul of our souls, the inseparable source of our days and nights, no matter how difficult the days and how dense the nights. In one mode or another, directly or indirectly, my letters to my friends are meant to convey the eternal nearness of the supreme Transcendence that trod our dust and left guiding footprints for us to put our own steps
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into their moulds as if that Transcendence were one with us in our inmost selves. All we need to do is to tell them: "Be with us and never leave us." They are even more anxious to be our parents than we can be to figure as their children.
Dear friend, the warm leap of your heart towards them through my words is the greatest compliment I could receive for publishing "Life - Poetry - Yoga".
(23.12.1990)
As you want me to help you, you must know how exactly I have been on the move. You wonder why my "prayer" for your success in the venture you had in mind did not get answered. Maybe it failed because of my own shortcomings which are legion. But you must remember that the main thrust of whatever prayer I have is to put you in the Mother's hands as intensely as I can and the particular object you may have in view is carried along as a sincere recommendation but not pushed upon those hands. The main thrust tends to ensure that through whatever happens - outwardly favourable or not - the Divine may bear you closer to your soul's fulfilment. If there is a result unfavourable in appearance, you must still have the faith that, when the Divine has been deeply invoked, the heavenly hands will always be stretched forth to you even across the apparent contretemps and you have to reach out to clasp them and be drawn wherever they want to take you. This is the secret by which a transmutation can be made of the most drossy circumstance and by which the most winding ways can still lead you - in the Wordsworthian phrase - to "God who is our home".
This does not mean that we should easily accept the obstacles in our path. Having set our aim we have to combat them, but the combat itself is to be inwardly dedicated to the Supreme. If it proves vain, we should not despair - much less hold that our prayer for achievement was poor and so God has turned it down. God may have refused to grant it for our own good which we have not yet comprehended - or
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else the passage has been blocked by the powers of Ignorance that still have a role to play in a universe the Supreme for a reason of His own has decreed to evolve from a starting-point the very opposite - the Rigveda's "darkness wrapped within darkness" - of the divine plenitude. But never forget that once we have truly put our fate in His charge He will pierce through to us no matter what the obstacle and make that very obstacle a short cut for us to the grand goal: an ever greater nearness to His life-perfecting Presence. On our part we have to call out to Him: "Make me realise that You are hidden behind this baffling misfortune, reveal to me your boon and your blessing at the end of this rough road, flash on me the soul's good that you can bring about through everything if I but strive to feel with all my heart that its beatings cannot but resound to Your secretly approaching footsteps."
I don't think you really need me to bring to your attention the truth I have expounded at some length. Apart from your bewilderment at one desired project coming to nothing, your letter shows an attitude born of the soul's spontaneously profound wisdom. I would not be able to state better the keen devotion to the Mother's guiding light and the enthusiastic confidence in its being all-in-all for you. 1 note also the wide charity of your heart, the fervent good-will towards every creature. But your estimate of me seems too high. True, I have accepted you as a dear friend and I shall do my best to help you in your aspiration to go side by side with me spiritually, but you and not only I must pray that I may have the right illumination from the Mother to advise you.
I was indeed overjoyed to have appeared to you in far France at 5.30 a.m. with such a heart-suffusing effect. You had, as you say, "a tremendous cardiac shock" because my own cardiac organ must have roared and raged with love to fly to you and mingle its own impassioned glow with the dawn-break of August 28.
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Evidently it was on a surge of the vital being - the strongest and the most vehement part of our instruments of expression on the earth-scene - that my soul suddenly came to you. It could not have been the mental being on a visit, for then the soul would have projected itself more calmly, more ethereally. Nor could it have been the subtle-physical's France-ward sweep, for then some of the marked characteristics of the gross-physical would have lingered. I would have at least slightly limped and there would have been a soupcon of a small occasional impediment in speech.
It was quite fitting that the vital being was the vehicle of my visit. For it is through this component of the soul's many-aspected manifestation that the soul's emotion gets most effectively conveyed. Transposed to spiritual values its movement has been made most memorable to me by some words of the Mother. She once told me that the surrender of the vital being to the Divine is the most glorious possible: it has an absoluteness of expressive force, a throwing of oneself at the Divine's feet with a thundering completeness, as it were, which no other part of us can equal. A more personal reference by the Mother to the vital being occurred when I wondered to her what had held me on to her through so many distracting vicissitudes of my career and despite such a multitude of frailties in me. She said: "Your vital being." I was quite taken by surprise. I said: "I thought it was my mind which kept in me some Godward balance." My vital being had always struck me as a part full of waywardness and easily tempted away from the straight path of sadhana. That it had such a secret strength as to keep me turned in the divine direction in the midst of a thousand distractions was indeed a revelation to me.
When I looked into myself and tried to feel the shape and structure, so to speak, of this vital being of mine I realised some characteristics. There was a certain rashness from the very beginning. I seemed to be accident-prone, but J had the tendency to laugh in the face of danger and ill-luck. The two virtues I most admired were Courage and Generosity. I was
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never a dynamic nature, I preferred to be at rest and did not court enterprise and constructive activity. Special stimulus was needed for the best possibilities to come forth. That was Sri Aurobindo's reading: he recognised in me a capacity for heroism but mostly when extreme circumstances served as a goad. What was more typical was the power of endurance and a resilience in the wake of physical illness or psychological misfortune. There was also a lightness of heart, When Nirodbaran asked Sri Aurobindo how it was that he felt mostly in the dumps while his friend Amal was always laughing, the Master pointed to a difference in temperament. This meant, I suppose, that the same adverse circumstances could draw a response of brooding depression on the one side and on the other a gesture of brushing away the burden with a smile, as if to say: "Oh, it's just a passing whiff of foul weather!" Both the attitudes came by nature rather than by thought-out practice. And it was the vital being that reacted in two different ways.
What the Mother communicated by those words which baffled one who was wont to take himself as predominantly a mental person was the fact that, once having found in the depths of me the sense of the Divine in Sri Aurobindo and her, the vital being refused to go under when its own pull towards outer things and its own daring to take risks landed it in mazy conditions. I may recall here my appeal to the Mother never to slacken her inner grip on me no matter how much I may loosen mine on her. The conviction that she would get me out of the worst predicaments was the vital being's - something instinctive and not reasoned out. The same instinct prevailed when I let myself go into whatever attracted me, however unsafe it might be. I must have overdone my confidence in her, or else she would not have warned me once: "It is true, as you say, that we have saved you from various troubbng or unsafe situations, but you are tending to exploit our protection. Don't do that."
The Mother's stress on my vital being has made me happy when I view it in terms of symbolism. You know that
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the Rigvedic Rishis figured the vital being in man as a horse and you know too that I have been a passionate lover of horses and that in spite of my lame left leg I have ridden them exultantly, relishing all dangers like "a giant's wine" before I joined Sri Aurobindo's Ashram at the age of 23. Even after entering the peace of the Ashram my love of those galloping glories continued inwardly. One rare day I caught sight of a huge horse passing with its rider under my first-floor, window. I rushed down to the street and kept walking behind it until it grew a speck in the distance. The memory of this four-footed apocalypse haunted me for weeks. I even thought how marvellous it would be if I could have this horse living with me in my room! I believe that in a past birth I must have been the Roman emperor Caligula. He was a monster of cruelty but he had one transcendent redeeming feature. He had a horse which he adored. It was given the most luxurious apartment in the royal palace. Every day it was taken to the senate and privileged to have the decisive vote. All resolutions were accepted or rejected according as this paragon of supposed wisdom shook its head one way or another. Surely you will admit a Caligulan madness in me when I tell you what I thought on hearing the Mother once hold out the hope to me of having my lame leg cured some day by her supramental power. I was full of soulful gratitude, but the first thing I thought was: "How wonderful it will be to have, without a care in the world, a big beautiful white horse between my thighs!"
Quite an earth-bound vision - but doesn't it hark back to the Vedic white stallion, Dadhikravan - symbol of "the purified life-energy", as Sri Aurobindo has taught us -marching ever towards the dawn, the first flush of the Divine Realisation, according to Sri Aurobindo's insight into India's most ancient scripture?
Some semblance of this Dawn appears to have called Sri Aurobindo's "Amal Kiran" ("The Clear Ray") to rush subtly to his dear friend's room far away at 5.30 a.m. to share in the birth of daylight.
(10.9.1991)
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Your sincere poignant letter has deeply moved me. I can see that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are so shrined in your heart that nothing can ever remove them. I venture the paradox that even if you were let loose in a festive paradise teeming with enchanting houris and you took your fill of them, you would still be an ardent disciple of Sri Aurobindo, a fervent devotee of the Mother. How then can your fairly sparing conjugal life with a peaceful-minded, sweet-tempered and spiritually helpful wife plunge you into "utter gloom and depression" for "the next few days" after each sexual act? You are not living in the Pondicherry Ashram where abstention from the common turns of human nature is expected and where the very atmosphere is conducive to it. Living as you do, in the role of a "householder", the mental self-flogging and self-condemnation in such a violent way are out of place. Neither the Master nor the Mother would approve the fits of despair and depression which overwhelm you. A fall into them strikes me as worse than the periodic fall into what you feverishly consider devilish temptation.
These morbid reactions belong to the same level of the lower vital self as the moods of passion that trouble you every ten or fifteen days. I may go to the extent of saying that they are manifestations of the same force that sexually engulfs you - they are part of a manic-depressive syndrome and repare in a subtle way the future upsurge of lust. It seems to me that you take them as if they were penalties you have to pay for your supposed sins. I would advise you to avoid them altogether. Be perfectly calm and inwardly offer to our Gurus what you have just done. You may object: "How can I offer to the Divine what I regard as an act of shame?" Surely, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not say: "Bring to us only your"good points." They say: "Put before us all your weaknesses, all your faults and failures, so that we may deal with them. By offering them to us, you put them out of yourself. If your soul belongs to us, then the whole of you - 'warts and all' - must be laid in our hands, a
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continuously willing gift, for us to remould it in our own manner and in our own time.''
A wide equanimity is what you badly need to cultivate. Let the moments of sex-indulgence be a mere interlude between a serene stand before and a peaceful poise after. As a result of this practice, you will find that during this interlude itself a background-consciousness will develop which will be mysteriously you, untouched in the midst of all the excitement in your surface being and leading gradually to less and less frequency of the cry for "sex". Of course, the equanimity to be cultivated is accompanied by a remembrance of the Mother and by a gesture of offering one's being and one's doing. The slowly developing background-consciousness too will learn distantly to remember and offer.
Please give up your present fretting. You are a very normal householder doing Yoga. All the adverse effects on your health - "APD, colitis, symptoms of duodenal ulcer" and the general run-down feeling - are due to your hypersensitive fretting and not to your wrongly supposed demoniac lusting. I can assure you that fruitful Yoga can be done even by a householder outside the Ashram. I have lived as a married man outside the Ashram for ten years in Bombay: 1944-1954. So what 1 am telling you is from direct personal experience. Sincerity and a quietly burning aspiration and devotion will carry you through, step by step," towards your goal of brahmacharya.
(19.9.91)
Referring to Savitri as "a wide ocean" and your feeling that you "can touch a drop only", you quote a sloka from the Gita: "Even a little of this dharma delivers from the great fear." The last two words ring a bell in my mind. This mahato bhayat - this great fear." - what does it evoke in the spiritual vision? Somewhere in the Upanishads there is a phrase with some such suggestion as: "Where there is one, there is no fear: fear comes where there are two." The Isha Upanishad
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asks about the spiritual seeker in whom the One Self has become all creatures: "How shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, who sees everywhere oneness?" Evidently, the delusion, the grief come from the common human state obsessed by cosmic multiplicity and lacking in the realisation of the unitarian Atman, the single Brahman who, in the Isha's words, "has gone abroad" and manifested the diverse devious phenomena in which we are submerged. The "great fear" of your quotation strikes me as being the unillumined condition of our life, what the post-Upanishadic Vedanta dubs samsara, maya, with their perils and pitfalls, in which the soul is ever liable to wander for ages away from its true goal. My idea gets confirmed when I read in the Taittiriya (II. 7) that when a man has found the invisible, bodiless, indefinable and unhoused Eternal to be his refulgent firm foundation, then "he has passed beyond the reach of fear". If "fear" characterises or represents the phenomenal existence, the world of meandering multiplicity, surely Atman or Brahman, the ultimate Self of selves, the single supreme Reality would be the very opposite. And actually we have the Brihadaranyaka (IV. 4.25) saying: "Brahman is indeed fearless. He who knows it as such certainly becomes the fearless Brahman." Again, the same Upanishad (TV.2.4) figures Yajnavalkya exclaiming: "You have obtained That which is free from fear, O Janaka!" It is curious that, unlike Shankara and his ilk, the Upanishads rarely allude to moksha or mukti, "freedom, liberation". I can find only one reference anticipating in a general manner the sense of mukti. The Brihadaranyaka (IV.2.8) has the expression: "being freed." Obviously the Upanishads are more psychological in a poetic way than philosophical in an abstract manner in rendering their spirituality. In this respect they connect up with the Rigveda rather than the Brahmasutras. In fact, I recall from the former some phrases aptly bearing on the theme I am discussing. The gods are said to bring about, by their fostering, the "fearless Light", abhayam jyotih, even in this world of fear and danger. Furthermore, we hear about Swar,
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the divine "solar" plane, in terms of the usual cow-bull symbolism: "The wide and fear-free pastures of the shining cows" (12th Hymn to Agni, verse 6).
Perhaps the compound adjective standing for the Rigvedic attitude points to at least a strong strain in the original Indian spirituality which persisted in the Upanishads in the midst of some tendencies towards the future sense of world-illusion and differed markedly from the later Shankarite complete intransigence towards earth-life as such but from what in it makes for fear - the fact that our existence does not rest on a sense of oneness and is always aware of a multitudinous otherness which is a cause of fear. A synonym of the "fear-free" mark of the state desired, aspired after, is the epithet "wide" in the Rigvedic phrase, since "wideness" is all-covering and leaves no room for confrontation with anything outside oneself.
(10.9.91)
I am glad you liked in my series "Life - Poetry - Yoga" of the October Mother India (pp. 236-37) the summaries I have essayed of the various religions of the world. You feel particularly apt my glimpse of the religion to which you belong and which was also mine until I joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and found there a widening and deepening and heightening of the central urge of Zoroastrianism as well as an exceeding of it as of all other religions not only by a direct spirituality but also by what struck me as a new vision in even the spiritual realm.
Yes, what you say about the Parsi community has much truth. Though it has in certain respects a happy-go-lucky superficiahty, it does have, as you observe, a general plasticity of mind and an instinctive drive towards whatever has a progressive prospect in it. But I wonder if our community has realised the most outstanding manifestation it has given of these qualities in their profoundest aspect. Even those
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who sing the praises of this microscopic yet distinguished group of less than a hundred thousand souls in a subcontinent teeming with hundreds of millions do not seem to have marked that manifestation. Let me focus it for you.
On 24 November 1926 Sri Aurobindo withdrew into privacy for a dynamic meditation towards a swifter descent of the Supermind upon earth and put the Mother forward to take charge of his disciples. Under her a regular Ashram in his name got organised. A lttle more than a year later - to be exact, on 16 December 1927 - a Parsi couple, husband and wife who had got married only a few months earlier arrived to dedicate themselves to the Integral Yoga which, of course, involved, among other things, giving up the married life. At this time the Ashram had only forty members and two of them were Parsis! Just contemplate what this means statistically. Out of the crores of non-Parsis no more than thirty-eight were permanent Aurobindonians. The two Parsis made a percentage hundreds of times higher in recognising at almost the very start of the Ashram Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as Avatars of a new age in human history with a project and a process for a total transformation of earthly life.
Don't you think these two people brought the greatest glory possible to their minute community and rendered it thereby for the future the most promising component of super-multitudinous India?
(2.10.1991)
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22
I am surprised that in Spanish the equivalents of the English "portent" and "portentous" - namely, "portento" and "por-tentoso -can only mean "wonder" and "wonderful" and their synonyms but never anything to do with the suggestion of a significant sign, whether favourable or unfavourable. In that case, Calderon could have chosen for his well-known play "Il Magico Prodigioso" the adjective "Portentoso" to go with the noun. It seems that both in Spanish and in French there is nothing corresponding to the ambivalent epithet "foreboding" in the Savitri-line:
The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone...
where, so far as the meaning in general is concerned, "portending" could substitute "foreboding" though it does not have the same subtle appositeness of atmosphere and rhythm. A French friend of mine has "menacant" which would make the mind of Night altogether a menace whereas it is itself more "menaced" than "menacing". Actually, here is not a question of immediate danger so much as of a vague peril felt in advance without being quite known as a peril. The exact poetic shade is of a prevision touched with fear or with a faint feeling of menace. "Menacant" would be "forbidding" rather than "foreboding"!
It is news to me that Spanish, unlike English or German, does not easily remodel or coin words. You have implied that Italian also does not lend itself with ease to such practice. You have written:
"The word 'ancilar' (you may recognise in it the Latin 'ancila' = 'she-servant') is an adjective which conveys the meaning of 'dependent', 'subservient', 'something which helps or supports from a humble position'. I do not know if all these meanings can be expressed so precisely and beautifully in Spanish by any other word. Nevertheless, this word
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is not recognised by the dictionary of the Real Academia de la lengua Espanola, and I am sure many Spaniards would be spellbound if they read or heard it. It has been very much used, perhaps created, by Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer and I am certain that nobody would doubt that as a neologism it is a success.
"Take another example: Dante's 'insemprare' in the line 'se non cola dove gioir s'insempra' ( Paradiso X, 148) - 'there where joy can be forever' - where the preposition 'in' and the temporal adverb 'sempre' ('always') undergo a twofold process of coalescence and transformation in a verb to express in a single word what neither Italian nor Spanish could say with such poetic force and depth of meaning."
Excuse me, but are you sure you have spelt the Latin for "she-servant" correctly? The original is ancilla (double l ). In any case, it is a pity that authoritative lexicons of Spanish don't list it. The common English derivation from the latin is via the adjective ancillaris. That is, we have "ancillary" meaning "subservient", but I can easily imagine an English poet writing:
Anciilar to God's will is the world's work.
Very interesting indeed is what you say about Dante's verbal innovation. I wonder whether in an English rendering we can incorporate a suggestion of his feat. Laurence Binyon has a fine sensitive version:
Save where joy tastes its own eternity,
Barbara Reynolds translates, just as creditably though less grandly, thus:
Where ever-present joy knows naught of time.
But the direct daring neologism escapes both the authors. An English coinage should spring to the eye if the Italian innovation is to be caught. What about an attempt like:
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Save there where joy lives self-eternalised?
You are welcome to visit India and me at your convenience and hold discussions on poetry. Yes, both Savitri and Ilion which mould the English language with a technical as well as semantic mastery have to be carefully probed before they wear a non-English garb. Ilion is less chockful of audacities than Savitri, but some turns of phrase in it also need a bit of elucidation. There is one not far from the start:
Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets
of ether....
Here one should not link "on" with "a chariot" in the prepositional sense that somebody is on a chariot, fleeting: the rest of the passage will fail to show who is fleeting charioted. The drift is: "Even as a chariot divine fleets on..." Just the chariot moving fast onwards is meant. The next line's "Swiftly when Life fleets" shows that "Life" is compared to "a chariot divine".
Then there is the line a little later:
Half yet awake in light's turrets started the scouts of the
morning...
The verb "started" does not indicate the scouts beginning to move or making a start of anything. It simply connotes "making a sudden involuntary movement due to surprise". Please forgive me if I am sounding too schoolmasterish. Most probably I am telling you what you already know.
(10.8.1991)
Ups and downs of the sadhak in us are natural. Don't worry about them. The progress towards perfection is never uniform until the whole of our being has been unified. The unification takes long but it is certain if the central self, the innermost psyche, grows more and more aware in all our
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movements. It has the master-key to open every part of us to feel what Wordsworth calls
A greatness in the beatings of our heart.
To aim at this unification is our immediate concern - the pervasive sense of the Divine within us. And as we move towards such pervasion an automatic concord gets created with our surroundings. But we must be patient. It takes long for the grand finale to be struck. With as much equanimity as we can muster we have to meet whatever wrong notes ring inwardly or outwardly. If we do this, they turn into stepping-stones towards the ultimate harmony. Of course, our equanimity has to be, as a phrase in Savitri goes,
A heart of silence in the hands of joy.
For we are offering our unwounded poise to the Holy Feet that are leading our pilgrimage to the satyam-ritam-brihat - the True, the Right, the Vast - the ideal set before the world from the beginning of our history by the Vedic Rishis. And we are doing the offering with a rush of rapture born of love: "hands of joy." Our equanimity is not of an intellectual Stoic: it is that of a spiritual Epicurean. An Eternal Face whose eyes are depths of immutable bliss and whose mouth is a moulder of ever-new beauty is our goal.
Don't tax yourself with the problem whether bodily divinisation will take place in this very life. Let all your inner self be a constant remembrance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and let that remembrance shape your outer life to a consecrated strength which is at the same time a dedicated sweetness. Thus will you lay the foundation of a future, whether in this life or another, of a divinised body.
(9.10.1991)
It is natural that those lines from a Christian hymn which
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meant such a lot to me should go home also to you. Indeed your condition is still worse than mine though mine has worsened since the time I quoted to the Mother, as fitting her relationship to me, that poignant phrase from the hymn: "help of the helpless." I really admire the courage and calmness and composure with which you carry on. Surely it is your constant feeling that you are a child of the Divine Mother and that she is making the utmost possible of your soul's embodiment - truly it is this conviction of yours which is the cause of the quiet smile taking you through all your difficulties from day to day.
Outwardly the hymn's phrase applied to me forty years ago because of the defective left leg I had to put up with. 1 could not lead a normal safe physical life, fully self-helped. But there was also an inward relevance of those words. I seemed to lack a will powerful enough to push me through the spiritual life successfully. A call had come - but even there, as you know, the Guru had to come in search of me: the newspaper sheet covering the box of the shoes I had bought fell open at home in front of me revealing the article headed: "A Visit to the Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose." Without this act of grace I wonder whether I would have entered Sri Aurobindo's Ashram at the age of 23 years. I might have wandered into it after almost a lifetime of drifting here and there in quest of my soul. You will remember too that when I first went out of the Ashram for a visit to my grandfather after six and a half years of stay with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother my one appeal to the Mother was, in effect: "Please never give me up even if I myself tend to give you up!" The Mother granted the favour I had so intensely solicited and that is why I have been enabled to remain under her wings all these years.
A clear sign of my sort of Yoga may be seen in the passage I chose when once the Mother asked the group of us, sitting with her in the evening in the "Prosperity Room" before the Soup Distribution downstairs, to mention what lines we cherished the most in her Prayers and Meditations. She had
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brought her manuscript with her and was cutting out of it whatever passage was our favourite and giving it to us after pasting it on a blank sheet of paper and putting her signature along with the date. My selection was from the prayer whose start runs in the English translation: "O Divine and adorable Mother, with Thy help what is there that is impossible?" The sense behind my selection must have been: "Even I who am an impossible candidate for the Integral Yoga can go on if the Divine Mother whom I can't help adoring for her sweetness and light and strength takes me up and bears me towards whatever realisation Sri Aurobindo has in sight for the earth."
It is noteworthy that the end of the prayer whose few opening lines I offered as an echo of my heart's throbbings, as it were, brings us a statement which prophesied in general the consummation of Sri Aurobindo's work and hers and which she turned into the present tense on March 29, 1956, making it run as a Message referring back to February 29 when the Supramental Manifestation had taken place:
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.
I speak of a consummation in general because on the evening of February 29 certain aspects of the Supermind became in the inner or subtle layer of the earth a permanent part of terrestrial history. Here was a definite turn in the process of evolution. A breakthrough was achieved. Further manifestation of the Supermind was to be expected, leading ultimately to an emergence of the new consciousness in the outer or gross-physical layer of our planet and to a gradual transformation of not only the human mind and life-force but also the very body in which they function. In this great change the main motive-power is to be what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have called "the psychic being", the true
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soul in us acting from the depths of what we may term the inmost heart behind the complex of emotional movements, the depth where what may be designated the emotion of the ideal - the intense urge towards the"True, the Good and the Beautiful - is experienced directly as a one-pointed love for a Supreme Master or Mother of the world who is stationed at once on some secret altitude and in some arcane profundity. I am reminded of that invocation put by Sri Aurobindo into the. mouth of his Aswapati:
0 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....
This invocation always sprang to my lips whenever in the early morning the Mother came to a first-floor balcony and gave darshan to the sadhaks and sadhikas gathered in the street below. Once she came with her hair unbound and partly falling about her face. The sight of her like that has inspired the beginning of a poem of mine entitled "Vita Nuova" ("New Life"):
Haloed by some vast blue withheld from us,
Her pure face smiles through her cascading hair -
Like a strange dawn of rainfall nectarous
It comes to amaranth each desert prayer.
What is sought to be conjured up is a picture of Divine Grace. The Grace is twofold - beauty and benediction. It hails from a height of spiritual consciousness far beyond our reach, but, wearing the transfigured form of a face like ours, it brings to us with its joy and compassion a radiance rising out of the Mystery beyond and approaching us with its loveliness framed in loose-hanging hair, as if an unearthly morning were breaking through thin refreshing rain. This image evokes the suggestion of a transfiguring response from
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regions of immortality to the appeal of our human state, barren of true bliss. In Classical mythology we often find "fields of amaranth" — ever-living blooms in the Home of the Blest, a visionary after-death island-paradise. I have used the noun "amaranth" as a transitive verb - a poetic licence - to render vivid and forceful the transfiguration envisaged of the state, as of a desert, which is behind every human heart's longing in a world of mutabili "this transient and unhappy world", as Sri Krishna puts it in the Gita.
The memory of her appearance on that balcony is unfading - an "amaranth" I may call it, a particularly impressive one because those appearances were at the start of the day, giving the many hours to come a beatific stamp received when the outer eyes were most sensitive with the touch of the inner eyes after the night's long withdrawal from the crowded siege of changing superficialities. Of course, the sense of that "morning glory" is not the only guide to me these days when we cannot have again and again as in the far past the physical delight of her body moving amidst us to trace for us a pathway to perfection, her countenance imparting to us a sweet strength which would enable us not to feel our pursuit of her onward and upward too tiring for our human frailty.
At present I seek her help repeatedly by fixing my gaze on her photographs. One especially has a great power over me. I first saw it looking out at me from above the body of Lalita after Lalita had died. I seemed to hear it summoning me to a greater effort at self-transcendence. It is a coloured enlargement presenting frontally her face and a little portion below it of the body. It hangs on the wall opposite the chair in which, when I am not typing, I spend most of my time reading, conversing or else in-going instead of letting the inner become out-going. Her expression here is very serious and the eyes are most penetrating but in a strangely quiet way. They look stem and yet there is a warmth in them, a basic tenderness. They are not the eyes of the censor, the judge, warning me against the falsehood in my nature as with a
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hidden threat. They have a firm compassion bent on never letting me prove unworthy of her love - never allowing any insincerity to veil the soul in me who is her child and who loves her. She is in dead earnest to protect me from my own weaknesses, my own tendencies to diverge from the straight path on which she has at last put me with so much care. This explains the deep seriousness in her expression. At one and the same time I am guarded and enfolded, kept strongly within bounds with the unrelenting softness of a firm protective embrace.
Enough about myself and my concerns! Now for your scruple about my use of the word "death" for Sri Aurobindo's leaving his body. You have rightly guessed that the adjective "mysterious" should modify - at least partly -the usual association of this word. But even if "mysterious" were not here, "death" would be the mot juste here in order to stress, as I have done, how really living in a most extraordinary sense was Sri Aurobindo when to all appearance life had fled. To drive home this sense a touch of stark "realism" was needed. In another earlier context the same touch was equally called for. You may remember my sonnet "Heaven's Light and Mortal Doom". There the last line of the octave and the first two of the sestet run:
Heaven's light vanishes - divine Aurobindo died.
But this one death where Heaven's own self gave room
For dire echpse of its eternity...
The Mother never liked the word "death" in relation to Sri Aurobindo. But when I showed her this sonnet, there was not the slightest demurring. She wholly accepted the usage as an inevitable part of the extraordinary thing I was visualising in the poem. Besides, from the standpoint of "form" -the rhyme-scheme and the metre - nothing else could replace it.
On palmistry I have nothing to say except to recount one incident of a long time back. I had gone to see a Maharash-
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trian Yogi - Devji by name - who had come to Bombay and about whose powers an article had come my way. This was before my visit to Sri Aurobindo's Ashram and before even the article on it which decided my spiritual future. The man in whose flat Devji was staying called me to himself instead of directing me to the inner room where his guest was receiving people. I was in full English dress - necktie and all - with a felt-hat in my hand. I must have looked rather strange as a seeker of Yoga. The host asked me to show him my right palm. On examining it he shook his head. "What's the matter?" I inquired. He said: "You are fated to have four children. Why are you bothering about Yoga?" I quickly countered: "But I don't have a single one yet. Please let me go in." With a disgusted face he waved his hand towards the door of the room concerned. I was tempted to steal a glance at his own palm thus fleebngly exposed. But, of course, I had no clue to where his reproductive power might be indicated. This whole curious incident took place about sixty-one years ago and I haven't had even one offspring. So much for palmistry - at least in my life!
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23
I thank you for your sustained periodic generosity to our work.
You have posed me the question:
"What is the interrelation between the Mother and Her Grace? I have searched for a clear answer in the books of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, as well as in your books and Mother India. On the one side the Divine Grace seems quite independent and separate; on the other side it appears to me to be the most important instrument of the Mother and a part of Her."
You quote a number of passages from the Mother and then conclude:
'It appears to me that, on the one hand, I have to surrender exclusively to the Mother, and on the other hand to give all my thanks to the Divine Grace. Not conceivable? Surely a pragmatic question."
I would say that the division you see in the quotations is also pragmatic or practical, depending merely on the theme to be developed. To me there is no Divine Grace which is not an outflow from a Divine Person either directly through an inward intervention or by way of help through an outward agency.
In general the working of Grace has two aspects. One is the inscrutable touch beyond all concept of merit and demerit. It does not seem to be in consideration of anything done by one. It just falls Like a sudden beam of light which has in view some purpose of eternity to be fulfilled in a passage of time - some purpose which appears to run secretly behind or below the quivering or quiet moments that make up the life that we consciously know to be ours. This beam can fall as plausibly on a so-called sinner as on an apparent saint. It is something for which we cannot trace a reason. If we could, it would be Justice and not Grace.
Perhaps not inconsistently I may recall the Mother once
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replying to the query why we didn't always find justice being done in the Ashram. She simply said: "This is not a place of Justice. It is a place of Grace. If justice were to be done, who would deserve to be here?" By "here" was meant the life in the presence of the Incarnate Divine.
Now for the other aspect of Grace - the one with which you are concerned. It can also be connected with the Mother's reply I have just quoted. The Ashram has been a creation of the Divine Personhood become human flesh and blood. The Grace which acts in response to our cry for help is the same Personhood, essentially divine yet with a human mystery within it capable any time of becoming flesh and blood like ours. So I would say that for us the Divine Grace is best figured as that inextinguishable splendour which has assumed the world-guiding countenance of Sri Aurobindo and that ever-overflowing love with which the Mother's face has taken up the travails of our groping world. The one to whom you, as you say, "have to surrender exclusively" is no other than the giver of "the Divine Grace" which, according to you, has to be the receiver of all your "thanks". .
Those who do not belong to the group called together out of millions by the Grace in the first aspect of inexplicable choice may envisage the Saviour Strength under any guise -sustainer Rama or enchanter Krishna, compassionate Buddha or all-merciful Allah's mediator Mohammed, beneficent Kwanon or Holy Mary the eternal intercessor. Even the habitual unbeliever who, when he finds himself helpless, instinctively turns to he-knows-not-what, is bound to feel the vague vastness of some being for whom he has no name.
Your puzzlement is really of the surface mind. You have yourself spontaneously answered your own question when with your typical beauty of soul you give me a supreme compliment which I can never truly live up to. You write to me in words whose sweetness is unbearable:
"Again and again I ask the Mother why I have got from Her the wondrous privilege to be one of your friends. I can only be boundlessly grateful to Her and Sri Aurobindo for
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this miraculous act of Grace, and to you for the acceptance of their will."
I am greatly moved by what you write apropos of my advice to you in the letter of May 7, 1990 to keep plants nearby and establish a communion with them. You say: "It was in connection with your experience on the way to your chair at the Samadhi. This communion with plants is for me also a favourite occupation, even if it is only one flower. 1 have two flower-beds before my home which I can plant as 1 like to do. Naturally during the last two summers of my illness I could do nothing. But I have some very fine rosebushes, which blossom in summer without too much care. But my most wonderful rose is the dried-up one which is lying together with the leaf of the Ashram's Service Tree in a blue glass-bulb, covered with a lid in blue glass too. It is the rose of the Mother! I got it from Her in 1972. In the evening, when lifting the lid for a short time, I often have the miraculous experience that the rose has a wonderful fragrance and often of a different kind, and this after nearly 20 years! This is my best communion with a flower."
Your "short report" about your health is typical of you: "Backache a little better, the colon still a little obstinate; underweight almost unchanged. But in spite of all this I have more strength for my daily pilgrimage. All is a little easier to endure."
The bravery that breathes through these words derives from the frame of being which is reflected in the term "pilgrimage". The daily movement is not just that of a passer through life: it is that of one who has a sacred destination towards which goes a dedicated heart, a consecrated mind -the outer instruments of a soul which knows why it is on earth and whose eyes are lit up with the vision of the Eternal Beauty awaiting it at the end of every moment.
I may mention that these days it is very necessary for me that this vision which has not been much wanting earlier should persist and even grow intenser. For I am in a peculiar situation. I am doing this letter not on my typewriter but in
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my own hand and will get it typed. For I am in the Ashram Nursing Home. On October 15 I had a nasty toss in my own working room. Suddenly, while moving with the help of my "walker" I fell backward, with the "walker" falling on top of me. When I touched the floor I found my right leg terribly wrenched by being pressed behind my bottom; it was a position of great pain and, what was worse, one from which it was impossible for me to get free. If I had been alone, inevitably with my door locked from inside, I don't know what would have happened. Luckily my friend who takes great care of me during several hours of the day before noon and several hours after sunset was there. The time was about 9 a.m. She pulled out my leg and I was appalled to see its state. The half below the knee was in one line and the half from the knee upward was in another. The sight was most inartistic. I gave the knee a push and the two parts got into some sort of line.
The Ashram doctor was called. He pressed around the most injured part and suspected a fracture of the thigh-bone (femur). I was surprised, for, owing to my lame left leg, I have fallen hundreds of times and most awkwardly on occasion, yet never had a fracture. Now the X-ray revealed a nasty multiple break at the spot where the thigh-bone joins the knee. The knee was very swollen and had internal bleeding. Our doctor called an orthopaedic surgeon who offered me three options of treatment from which to choose. One was operative internal fixation of the fracture which would ensure faster healing and early mobility but carried the risk of operative and anaesthetic shock to the nearly 87-year-old physical system. The second mode was immobilisation in plaster of Paris from the waist down to below the knee; this would have allowed the leg to be moved as a stiff whole from one side to the other, but six weeks in a P.O.P.-cast would so stiffen the knee that the leg would never bend henceforth. The third was to use a Thomas's splint for the whole leg, skeletal traction through a slim steel rod driven in the shin-bone (tibia) and the whole contraption hung on
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what is called a Balkan beam so as to ensure a balanced traction that would allow early knee movements, but not allow me at all to turn from side to side in bed. There was also the possibility of bed-sores. Looking at the three options I said "All are bad, how can I choose?" I left it to the wisdom of the surgeon to make the best of a bad job. After much consideration the third option was favoured. So I am here for six weeks in bed in a complicated apparatus and another less Spartan six weeks with rehabilitation therapy. At the end it is hoped that I will be able to take the body's weight on the healed leg.
The only things in my favour during the three months are three. I may keep remembering that I have walked faithfully in my Guru's footsteps, for in 1938 he also stumbled and had a most painful fall, hurting, like me, his right knee and breaking his right femur, though at a higher point than mine. The second consoling feature is that all day I am facing a window to the south permitting an enchanting prospect of slanting boughs, swaying with trembling leaves, against a changing skyscape. The third is that somehow the body has been most peaceful and my so-called "constant cheerfulness" is not due to just a mental equanimity but to a concrete sense of physical stillness, holding some inmost gift of Divine Grace in the form of an intrinsic happiness in the very substance of the injured and immobilised body. This was most tangible, as it were, during a week and a half after the blood from the knee was "aspirated" under local anaesthesia and, on the next day, that steel rod was made use of to facilitate the "balanced" traction.
At the beginning my relatives and friends were much alarmed over the possible danger to my life from the forced prolonged immobility in bed. My doctor-nephew in the U.S.A., horrified by the news about me on the phone, warned that a sudden blood clot might form and, on reaching the heart, prove fatal. According to the practice in the States, he advised an immediate operation and then, as soon as possible, little walks in the room. My niece went anxiously
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to and fro between the extremely open-minded doctor in charge of me and my phoning nephew, carrying on the discussion as to what should be done with the possibilities available here in the absence of an operation. A special drug was suggested, but the facilities for "monitoring" it would be lacking in Pondicherry. In the meantime a doctor-friend of mine preferred the reassuring information that seemingly an "ethnic" factor rendered a clot due to the legs' immobility very rare among Indians. However, a small daily dose of Aspirin, the drug known for its unclott
My days are spent in meditation or else in writing letters, dipping into literary journals and preparing future issues of Mother India. At night I doze off in spite of my rigid position without the aid of sleeping pills, but every now and then I have to pass urine. Some of my friends - especially two women, one a highly efficient English professional nurse and the other the very able manager of Mother India - most willingly and excellently take turns at sleeping in my room to give me the urine bottle four or five times as well as to help in other ways. The one who used to take care of me in my flat visits me twice a day for some hours and devotedly ministers to my needs, including mechanical exercise and massage to my legs. A particular friend interested in my inner life takes notes from me on it besides assisting in general with genuine concern.
The Ashram Nursing Home is a remarkable place. The doctors and the nurses - all of them dedicated to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother - are giving exemplary service. All the daily arrangements are most conducive to the patients' comfort and the medical treatment is scrupulously regular. Then there is the cleanliness and hygiene of the place. I couldn't help joking to the medicos in charge: "If I had known that the Nursing Home was so wonderful, I would have come here much earlier!"
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to and fro between the extremely open-minded doctor in charge of me and my phoning nephew, carrying on the discussion as to what should be done with the possibilities available here in the absence of an operation. A special drug was suggested, but the facilities for "monitoring" it would be lacking in Pondicherry. In the meantime a doctor-friend of mine pro
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I wanted to know, it was important to know, why the accident had occurred. The knowledge is not to be mental, it has to come from a deeper source. Then we get a direction towards the opportunity to be taken. All the time Sri Aurobindo's hands and the Mother's are around us. Except for our follies, nothing actually happens here without their consent. They are even behind what we call catastrophes. Once these happen, our Gurus make them the means to push us along a new pathway. Part of their work is to ensure a "break" at times, though I do not necessarily mean breaking a bone!
When Sri Aurobindo went to jail, he asked Sri Krishna "Why?" The reply was that there was no other way to push him in the right direction. A drastic measure was needed to pull him out of politics. In my own small way I kept asking my Gurus for a clear answer to my question: "What is my fate now? What is the Grace granted me, however paradoxically?" The answer, on the night of October 22, was given as if face to face by Sri Aurobindo. It was around 1.15 a.m. The answer, clear and definite, was: "A greater calm and a greater self-dedication to the Mother. She will lift you high up beyond everything." That would mean complete freedom.
I am now as if lodged in some depth of my body most of the time. There is a great stillness, a compactness of consciousness in the physical self, a statuesque immobility over which passes continuously a breeze of happiness, the body can't but be happy. It is as though the physical arms were -in a phrase of Sri Aurobindo's - "taking to a voiceless supreme delight". The body is felt to have an existence of its own as a doer of Yoga. There is a kind of spiritual poise in the most outer nature. When this nature becomes wholly immobile, in a sense quite different from inertia, "Ananda" automatically follows. If only the immobility could last, become permanent! Then the body would have its own experience of liberation. I can't say mine has it, but some sustained bliss is present. My happy state appears to have no
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rhyme or reason for it. It just is. There is absolutely no attitude of the mind involved, no mental movement to be happy. I may describe it as an entire self-containment by the body, a holding together of the entire body-sense, a col-lectedness with a stilling of everything, a balanced moment prolonged indefinitely, as it were. Something grips one, one becomes totally free of talk, of controversy, of any altering situation. There is complete freedom and as a result an aura, a radiation all around, but that aura-sense is implicit, not explicit at present. One sort of holds the whole body inwardly suspended. I have earlier cultivated scattered moments of such suspense time and again. In the midst of talk, in the midst of dealing with people, you get out of everything, there is a transcendence of the usual time and space holding us. If one could remain like this always, it would be marvellous, with a physical translation of what Sri Aurobindo's Savitri calls
A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest....
Environing the present accident is the persistent feeling of a "hiatus", a break with the past. Now the constant and continuous cry from within is: "Make me Yours, wholly Yours! It is not that the inmost 'I' belongs to anyone else, to anything else, but my being yours is not yet concretised fully in the entire 'Me'."
All this goes on. There is profound contentment. The body seems to have discovered how it has to be in order to rest totally. I may sum up by saying: "From a teeming yet incomplete earth, through a brief deadly hell, to a long and spacious heaven whose numerous secrecies are waiting to be explored. Such has been my passage soon after October 15 till now."
Leaving aside the fun tinkling between friendly hearts, now a strange word about my much-praised "cheerfulness"
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to which you allude. What appears as cheerfulness has actually nothing to do with mind or temperament. Though I have always been a practitioner of equanimity, the sense 1 have at present is altogether bodily. The whole body is inwardly held in an absolute stillness through which a profoundly quiet happiness blows as if from some dreamland. I am reminded of that line of Wordsworth's, suggestive of Unformulable secrets:
The Wind comes to me from the fields of sleep.
My entire bodily self feels as if it were living in a heaven that is at once remote and immediate. The view I have from my window of green-glimmering swaying branches against a sky of changing colour-washes - light blue, grey-white, gold-pink - this view I can sit up in my bed and enjoy almost endlessly, as though it were a sort of reflection of the dreamland at which I have hinted. Out of the heaven in which I have suddenly been put, what new life-quality will be given to me by the hands of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother which I feel mysteriously approaching me? Already what my body is holding is an enormous gift. But I am sure that much more is in store during the long months ahead.
Reading all this you may think I have been rapt away from all things human. There you will make a mistake. My calmness holds all the sweet voices I have known. If great issues can be compared to small ones, I am reminded of those two lines beginning a poem of mine entitled "Oversold":
All things are lost in Him, all things are found:
He rules an infinite hush that hears each sound.
* .
I am observing in connection with the body's quiet happiness what 1 can only call a new phenomenon of "time". There is a marked difference in time's flow. The body knows an outer
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self and an inner self. The outer feels all that is going on, the diversity of things happening to it. It passes through various experiences and moves from moment to moment, marking their changes of atmosphere and mutations of mood. The inner stands beyond everything and feels all moments as exactly the same - not only is there a sense of sameness but there is also a sense of sheer limpidity, a space - as it were - absolutely clear of every event known by the outer physical self.
In traditional terms, it is the Purusha, the being, as pure and still witness in contrast to the Prakriti, the nature with its constant flux and interplay of dull, active and cool-minded qualities. This watcher, although existing in time, is free from time's hold. He seems timeless within the temporal process. There is no day-after-day for him, no long drawn-out passage of the hours. Time is for him an eternal instant accompanying the common succession of endless instants. Therein lies - according to my perception - the immobile yet not inert peace, the calmly joyous freedom that subtly pervades my body independently of whatever cheerfulness or equanimity my mind possesses. To put it otherwise, there has come a waking perception constantly continuing of the absence of time's long passage, similar to the absence we realise by a back-look when we wake up from a night's dreamless sleep. A fully awake and therefore fully enjoyed sleep, blotting out all length of time, goes on side by side with the common hour-to-hour wakefulness that is our daily life. This imperturbable smiling freedom from the sense of the varying sequences of time is experienced Like a magical point in the middle of my chest. My main physical consciousness is concentrated there. There is no anxious looking forward to the end of my supposed discomfort in a state of complicated "traction" which allows no turning left or right in bed. For all I care this state may go on for ever as long as there persists my body's strange and sudden acquaintance with what our old scriptures have called "the eternal eater of the secret honey of existence".
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Reverting to time-terms, one is inclined to think of a faraway reflection of what the great mystics name Nunc stans, "the ever-standing Now", a perpetual Present swallowing up all past and future. In our yoga's language I would not speak of any "standing". I would just say of myself: 'Tying, endlessly accepted, in the time-transcending love-lap of the Divine Mother."
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24
Thank you for so prompt a letter of genuine sympathy after hearing from S about my fracture. But why do you say I have had repeatedly to cope with such accidents? In my life of 87 years and of at least 870 tosses, this is the first time I have broken a bone - though I seem to have counterbalanced my long immunity by breaking the biggest bone in the body, the thigh-bone! You may be interested to realise that the leg is the same - the right one - and the bone too identical - the femur - as Sri Aurobindo's in 1938. So in one sense I may be considered to have walked very faithfully in my Guru's footsteps. Unfortunately I have done it with a great initial disadvantage: having had infantile paralysis - fully in the left leg and partially in the right.
I have heard that when Sri Aurobindo had his fracture and his body was thus made somewhat abnormal he remarked: "Here is one more problem to solve." Evidently he had the subject of physical Supramentalisation in mind. So we may say that up to the end of 1938 there was no question of changing the range of his Integral Yoga, And the hope the Mother had earlier expressed of curing me by the Super-mind's power was still a golden prospect. Even in 1950 Sri Aurobindo did not radically change his range; only, he for a purpose of his own gave up his body's fulfilment and left it to the Mother to fulfil the ultimate aim. Now that she too has abandoned it for her own reasons, the whole problem on which you have dwelt has arisen: "Will it be realised by any of her children in the near future?"
You have dwelt on it with two focal points in your letter to Nirod as well as in the letter to me. One is the question of postponement as declared by me. The other is whether anybody staying outside the Ashram and not in the intimate physical presence of our Gurus could be thought of as enjoying the privilege of getting physically supramentalised. In this connection you refer to a passage in Nirod's corres-
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pondence with Sri Aurobindo and you state your own case in which, in spite of your proposing to offer all your possessions to the Mother and settle in the Ashram, the Mother told you to carry on your yoga and your work outside the Ashram. Your query is whether by being told this you could be said to have been excluded from the possibility of becoming a supramental Swiss.
I have written out a reply in place of Nirod. He has read it and signed it as showing his approval. I am enclosing it with this letter of my own.
Let me end by again appreciating your concern for me and by hinting that paradoxically this terrible-seeming accident at so advanced a stage of senescence (though luckily not of senility) has brought an unexpected inner boon.
Reply in place of Nirod
As regards physical transformation, it is not only Amal who has written that it is postponed: Nolini also said the same thing.
Several doers of the Integral Yoga have wonderful experiences seeming to relate to the body. But these experiences are really in the subtle-physical and, in spite of them, the gross-physical remains unchanged. Neither Sri Aurobindo nor the Mother achieved physical supramentalisation though it can be inferred from certain statements of theirs that if their yoga had been an isolated one they would have finished it long ago.
After the supramental manifestation on February 29, 1956 in the earth's subtle-physical layer, the Supermind has become an active factor in the earth's evolutionary process. Slowly it will press into the gross-physical layer in the course of time. What our present yoga seems to be is a participation in a gradual process extending over a long span of time which would be more than our present lives. In other words what Amal has somewhere called the "revolutionary" phase of our yoga which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were
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carrying on with a view to achieving everything in one life is no more there. It has given place to an evolutionary phase.
I believe that without the close physical presence of our Gurus the final transformation, involving a lot of difficulty and danger, cannot be done. But this does not mean that those whom the Mother herself commanded to work and do yoga outside the Ashram were considered unfit for it. Even in the Ashram the time had not come for the final stage. So it did not crucially matter, in relation to the ultimate transformation, whether one was in the Ashram or away from it -particularly when one was outside by the Mother's wish. If the time had come for the final phase these people would certainly have been summoned to be here. To see the situation in terms of exclusion is unwarranted. There is really no inconsistency in what Sri Aurobindo wrote and the actual state of affairs as regards being in and out of the Asliram.
The Mother's wanting Ananta to be here while advising you to work outside is easy to understand. The only chance for him to progress was in the Ashram.
You have mentioned politics. The Mother was against politics as practised today, but surely she could not exclude from the Supermind's sphere any part of essential human activity. The same would hold in the matter of money-making.
To speak of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother failing is shortsighted. We can only say that they chose not to continue their work as at one time envisaged. We must remember that line in Savitri:
His failure is not failure whom God leads.
Also to be remembered are Sri Aurobindo's words to Dilip. They called on him not to have crude superficial ideas about the Avatar's work. Sri Aurobindo asked why the Avatar should not choose what looked like failure if such failure suited better his long-term strategy.
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Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have been to us both separate and one. Sri Aurobindo put the Mother forward in his spiritual work, saying that this arrangement was made not only for convenience's sake but because it was the right arrangement for an aim like earth-transformation, involving as it did the detailed play of the Shakti, the dynamic divinity.
In the matter of spiritual relationship, he declared that to accept the Mother as one's Guru was automatically to accept him. On the other hand, according to him, "if one is open to Sri Aurobindo and not to the Mother it means that one is not really open to Sri Aurobindo". This implied that one could seemingly open oneself to him without opening oneself to the Mother, but such a disparity would violate the full, integral doing of his Yoga. The Mother is the all-compassing figure in it.
After he had left his body, his oneness with the Mother and his approach to us through her became even more a dynamic truth than before. But one may not have realised it at once. I can tell you how it was driven home to me.
When, on her 80th birthday the Mother gave a message in which she referred to her body as "un corps transitoire" in French and translated the phrase into English as "a transitory body". I got a shock. It suggested to me that she might give up her body some time and, what was worse, its constitution was such that it could not be a lasting one - one which would gradually undergo complete transformation and become a spiritual physical instrument with an intrinsic permanence, a natural immortality, answering to the non-transitory character of her divine consciousness.
I raised a vehement objection to the word "transitory". I proposed that the right epithet would be one which would translate in English as""transitional". This epithet would mean that the Mother's present bodily state was part of a changing process - a phase among various phases of physical alteration leading ultimately to "le corps glorieux", the human body glorified into being divine.
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When the Mother did not seem impressed by my protest and went even to the extent of saying: "All bodies are transitory", I impulsively blurted out: "If Sri Aurobindo were here he would never let you use the word 'transitory'." After a moment's silence absorbing this most extraordinary outburst such as no one could ever have been expected to make, the Mother remarked in a steady yet cutting tone: "You are being insolent. Do you know where Sri Aurobindo is?"
"Suddenly I felt my eyes opening wide and seeing the truth. Surely Sri Aurobindo was with her all the time; surely he was one with her and whatever she said came from him!
I answered: "Oh, I am sorry, Mother. I know that he is centred in you and when you say or do anything, it is he who is working. Please forgive me." She smiled compassionately and blessed the fool in front of her. What "transitory" had truly meant remained unexplained at that time. Later, perhaps seeing my real concern for her physical continuance, she handed me a note which explained her adjective: "All body in course of transformation is by this very fact transitory. Transformation means being changed into something else."
In connection with this incident I remember an occasion when the Mother casually observed to a few of us present: "People are saying that now something of Sri Aurobindo's facial expression is coming into me. My smile looks somewhat like his."
My sense of Sri Aurobindo's immanence in the Mother came acutely to the fore on the occasion when the question arose of seating people during a certain special meditation. A number of disciples had come to be allowed to sit upstairs meditating with the Mother during darshan days when the larger group sat downstairs around the Samadhi in the Ashram courtyard. Nolini had made a list and I was given, along with some others, the supposed privilege of sitting in Sri Aurobindo's room. The Mother herself as usual would be in the Meditation Hall, the outermost of the three parallel rooms upstairs - the room at whose inmost extremity there
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was a small room where Sri Aurobindo and she used to sit and give darshan.
The moment I was told that my seat was in Sri Aurobindo's room I could not help protesting: "No, Mother, I don't want to sit there. I want to sit where you will be sitting." She gave me a knowing look, smiled faintly and told Nolini: "Change Amal's seat as he wishes." To me Sri Aurobindo's room was indeed very sacred - permeated as it was by the atmosphere of his stay there over 23 years. Like everybody I knew how intense this atmosphere was and yet the conviction was borne in on me that Sri Aurobindo must be most directly present where the Mother was. Now that he had left his own body his presence would be most powerful, most dynamically immediate in her body.
Of course, one cannot deny that Sri Aurobindo could be present at many places at once. His would be a multifarious omnipresence, and such would be a fact not only in terms of wide-spread infinite consciousness but also in terms of a concentrated focal point - a subtle body setting forward Sri Aurobindo just as he had been set forward in the years of his physical embodiment.
I recollect a talk with the Mother on this aspect of Sri Aurobindo's existence after he had passed away. An account had come of how on one occasion Dilip Kumar Roy, after he had left the Ashram, had been reading a long poetic composition of his. Indira, his chief disciple, who had many occult powers which had developed during her short stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram with Dilip, said that she saw Sri Aurobindo himself listening to the recital. I reported to the Mother what Indira had said. The Mother remarked: "It is true that Sri Aurobindo had made an emanation of himself to accompany Dilip. And it is evident that he has not withdrawn this emanation. Indira with her 'second sighf perceived its presence. But it does not mean that Sri Aurobindo in his central reality in a subtle form was there. That reality is here in the Ashram, with me."
I may add that for many, after both the Mother and Sri
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Aurobindo have withdrawn from the visible physical scene, their central reality, in a subtle yet recognisable form corresponding broadly to their previous physical manifestation, is in the Ashram and not anywhere else. That is the basic importance of this place where the two Avatars had physically lived.)To the sincere soul anywhere, both of them are concretely its companions, but that is by way of emanation. The emanation is indeed no other than they, being essentially a gift of the Divine's Grace, yet there is always the centre of a circle distinguished from the radii carrying the effluence of this centre all around.
A famous definition of God's presence is: "A circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere." This is true of God in His eternal infinity, but when God has taken a physical form, when He has assumed Avatarhood and made Himself like us for our sake and entered into the chequered manifoldness of our human existence, the very fact of this earthly focussing of that eternal infinity not only conveys in general an extra power of Godhead to the earth; it also sets up a particular source of this power where the earthly focussing established its bodily self-expression.
We cannot ever forget how that self-expression glowed beatifically among us while it sought to spread its light and love and laughter to every corner of our long-labouring, grief-pursued yet immensity-haunted and mortality-challenging speck of a globe careering, secretly all-important among millions of galaxies, through endless time and space.
(8.12.1991)
You have asked, "What is it to be an Aurobindonian?"
To me an "Aurobindonian" is essentially one who constantly carries on the practice of the presence of Sri Aurobindo and aspires to catch as much as possible the traits which we discern as typical of him. What are, in brief, the "Aurobindonian" traits?
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A wide unshaken look on time's unrest, .
an immense patience allied to an untiring pursuit of perfection, a deep faith in an omnipotent guidance leading us through all, an up-gaze towards a plenary Truth by which every side of life can be transformed, a universal light in the out-looking eyes, a compassionate insight into human frailties, a joyous imaginative response to Nature, both living and inanimate, a lordly sense of the supreme Self of selves, a simple heart ever adoring the Divine Mother and with profound humility facing always an Infinite still to be realised.
(22.11.1991)
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25
Whether I reply soon or after some delay you are always present to me and happy thoughts fly towards you. Especially at the Samadhi there is a close communication, for there more than anywhere else I have a sense of us meeting within that eternal source of love and unity - the Mother's creative and transformative and all-harmonising heart. Always to live with a sense of being born from that fountain of felicity is the very meaning of life for us.
You have asked me how to meditate or concentrate. I know of no particular method and these terms never occupy my mind. I am aware only - as I have been saying from a long time back- of a warmth and a glow in my heart, and the warmth is the Mother's presence and the glow is Sri Aurobindo's. 1 try to make my hie a submergence in them and an emergence from them. The submergence may be called my eternity and the emergence my time. The former gives a touch of what the Neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus described as "the flight of the alone to the Alone." The latter brings the feeling of what the Upanishads figure forth as the one Fire that has become many flames. We may speak of the submergence as a hint of the Transcendent, the emergence as a glimpse of the Universal. And the real beauty of the Yogic life lit up by the grace of our uplifting Master and our enfolding Mother is that the high hint and the wide glimpse are not alternatives but concomitants. In literary language I may be said to be reminded of the poet Vaughan's line -
Rapt above earth by power of one fair face -
together with the dramatist Shakespeare's phrase:
O brave new world
That has such wondrous creatures in it!
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Perhaps you will express surprise at this exclamation, for the actual world is rather a huge medley. What I mean is that my inner turn towards the Mother's omnipresence brings about an attitude of both equanimity and benevolence and the ability to see a secret good in all things. There is also the conviction that if I appeal at all times to the omnipresent Mother and, remembering her, offer to her all the circumstances of life - my own actions as well as those of other people - everything that happens will somehow be turned by a mysterious divine alchemy to the good of my soul. Mark the word "soul". The Mother has said that when she sends her blessings they are meant for the soul. Not that no material benefits can come, but we cannot count on them. What we can be sure of is that through anything taking place the Mother's blessings will manage the soul's benefit, the soul's increase in light, its growing more and more a true child of the Mother.
From the stream of words thus far in this letter, please do not be swept away to the idea that Amal Kiran is sitting on top of the world spiritually. Keep in view my expressions: "hint" and "glimpse". There is also the word: "touch". I am indeed far from the spiritual magnitude and glory that we term "God-realisation". Nobody should want to fall at my feet - "feet of clay", to be sure! All I can say is that Sri Aurobindo, when he gave me my Ashram name, meaning "The Clear Ray", created for me the possibility of some soul-light by which the ever-moving jumble we call life might be somewhat clarified and irradiated to show itself to me now and again as - to quote Vaughan once more -
A quickness which my God hath kissed.
The kiss which is always occultly there is particularly palpable because of the fact that "my God" has been no faraway grandeur but an Avatar, a Supreme Being who has accepted to be flesh and blood and to take a share in the very jumble through which we humans pass. He has been
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gracious enough to look into my little depth and make it a tiny part of himself. The truth of the matter would be not that I have realised Sri Aurobindo but that Sri Aurobindo has realised me.
Not getting any letter from me for quite a while, you have ruefully written: "In this way days, especially 21 February, 29 March, 4 April have gone, big occasions for us. How long should I wait?" Surely, these great days must have brought you each its particular grace. What is 21 February? Do you remember that sloka in the Shwetashwatar Upanishad (III.8), one of the grandest utterances in the world's spiritual literature: "vedahametarn purusam mahdntam adityavarnam tamasah parastat" - "I have seen this great sun-coloured Being beyond the darkness." February 21, like August 15, marks the emanation of this Being from across the darkness into our world so that something of the sun-colour may come into our dull heads and our dim hearts. Next to these dates the most important is March 29 which brought together the two supernal emanations. The Mother's diary next day recorded her recognition of the Saviour Grace that had hailed from the Highest. And her experience in the preceding afternoon was a total permanent silence of her mind, the foundational state for the descent and settlement of all the infinities of the "overhead" light and force and bliss to be manifested in world-work. When asked about his experience of the meeting, Sri Aurobindo made an amazing declaration. In effect it ran: "I never knew what true surrender could be until Mirra surrendered herself to me - totally, down to every cell of her body." Here was revealed to him in fullness what he later made the central motive-power for us of his Integral Yoga of Supramental Transformation - the utter self-giving possible to the inmost soul - the psychic being - the foundational state without which a divinised earth-life cannot be built up. A date basic to the existence of a centre of radiation for the Aurobindonian Supermind is April 4. At 4 p.m. on that fourth day of the fourth month of the year, Sri Aurobindo set foot in Pondicherry in answer to an inner
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command of Sri Krishna, an adesa heard during his earlier Krishna-chosen exile in Chandernagore. From that moment the future Ashram was waiting to take birth.
You write: "I give you a free hand to decide and advise me. Believe me, I want Her smile, never the fulfilment of my ego. So if any change on my part is required, please let me know without any hesitation so that the best and happiest results may be ours." Reading this as well as some other parts of your letter I don't think you need any guidance from me. Your soul is awake and your inner movements are right. Only one thing you must guard against. The postcard I sent you said: "Don't be despondent." I know that your life is difficult and the handicaps you suffer from are very unusual. But I am not preaching from a position of normality, I am greatly disadvantaged by the condition of my legs, and movement is both difficult and dangerous. Sometimes the body feels extremely strained and I just want to stop doing anything. But then I turn to "that being no bigger than the thumb of a man" which the Upanishads speak of as "a fire without smoke" kindled perpetually in - to quote the same scripture again - "the cavern of the heart". At once the shadow vanishes and I remember those lines of Sri Aurobindo's which I have often quoted to friends from the poem called "Musa Spiritus" meaning "The Muse of the Spirit":
Trying to attune my ear to those footsteps I forget my own halting movement and even in the midst of it I feel tranquillity and freedom and my walk is as if a Maestro were executing perfectly some difficult passage in Wagner's music.
Certain things which we have to do pall on us, but that is
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because we have not inwardly offered them to the Mother. If some work we have to do is not enjoyed, we may be sure that it has not been consecrated to her. The moment the work is done as though for her sake, it becomes a path towards her -and what can be more refreshing than getting closer to her glorious Presence?
Possibly you will protest: "There are things which are so lowly, chores so common, even so soiled that it seems disgraceful to offer them to her. Is it not impertinent to associate them with the thought of her?" Such a notion is a great mistake. We cannot divide our life into matters fit for the Divine and matters unfit. To do so is to hide certain portions of our life from her transfiguring touch. How then can we follow Sri Aurobindo's motto: "All life is Yoga"? This motto has a general philosophical insight - the vision of a spiritual goal implicit in the evolution from matter to vital force and from vital force to mind, mind with its vague straining for perfection. In our immediate practical context, all life proves to be Yoga when whatever we do is made an occasion to invoke the Divine and lay it at His holy feet. To the Divine's love for us there is nothing great or small. The whole of us is wanted. This love is infinite and cannot be satisfied unless every finite bit of our lives is consciously dedicated to it.
(16.4.1991)
From where I sit at the Samadhi 1 get a view, through the "Service Tree'"s branches, of a patch of sky. Between 4.15 and 4.45 p.m., there is an intensity of colour which brings to my mind a phrase which resulted on my correcting a friend's poem:
The shining blue of the immortal light.
Into the depth of this colour I raise the image of whoever I am invoking the Mother for. Especially on the part where the
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lumbago has its grip on you - the small of the back - my imagination lets the sapphire luminosity play and I feel that lustre penetrating the whole aching area. I have the keen sense that the Mother's heavenly healing power is called forth by my prayer through this patch of a sustained splendour falling upon me as if - in the words of a poem of my own —
Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears
The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.
As I know that you on your side are also a long inward cry to the Mother, I have the conviction that the communion 1 try to establish with her cannot just hang in mid-air but must go home to you and reinforce your own profound contact. I may add that it is not only at the Samadhi that the welfare of my friend is my concern. Time and again a movement of good will, with the Mother's bright eyes looking on, takes place. But, of course, at the Samadhi everything comes to a soul-keen focus.
I am afraid all that I have said apropos of that half-hour's intense blue will be regarded by the pragmatic modem mind as a riot of fancy. But the truly poetic consciousness, no less than the mystical, knows our world to be the meeting-point of various hidden planes of being, and through certain configurations of earthly elements they peer out at us and by means of our response start their strange activiti
(26.2.1991)
To answer your questions, we must first get them into proper perspective. You say that now that the Mother is not in her
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physical body the Darshan Days - 21 February, 24 April, 15 August, 24 November - which, according to you, were reserved by her to shower special grace, do not have the same old obligatory and indispensable character. You add: "Now, rather all round the year and throughout each day we should keep ourselves constantly open and endeavour to advance on Her way with the help of Her more subtle but still powerful forces."
The Darshan Days marked certain significant occasions. The occasions still remain significant.I f, as you believe, the Mother's grace operates all throughout the year in spite of the departure of her physical presence, why should it not be thought to operate on those Darshan occasions in a special way as it used to do when her body was with us?
I share your faith that whatever the Mother does is always for the good of her children. Perhaps the more accurate way of putting the matter is that whatever happens is turned by her to our good. I say this because in the world, originally posited by the Divine, of a myriad mixed influences and agencies, many events have to be considered as imposed on the Divine, but the Divine always meets them with a spiritual strategy which invariably looks to the inner good of us all so that everything is made to work for our souls' closer and ever more close approach to the Eternal Light and Delight. Seen thus, the termination of both the Mother's life and Sri Aurobindo's is aimed at the advancement of our souls.
How exactly this "advancement" is to be understood is not an easy question to answer. Since the ultimate goal is integral transformation, including the divinisation of the body, we may assume that the end of their lives ultimately served that objective. But, on the basis of Sri Aurobindo's statements that the Guru's physical presence is needed to carry on for the disciple the crucial process of the body's transformation, I hold that at present this process is postponed. Nolini was of the same view. But, of course, short of the physical divinisation there is a vast range of spiritual development open to us and paradoxically renderd all the
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more open by the decision Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took to leave their bodies, for something momentous in our path is cleared by what we may call their "sacrifice". But how much advantage we take of it depends on ourselves to a fair extent. We may be induced to think that their physical absence leaves us rather in the lurch. Actually the Mother has clearly said that SriAurobindo, on leaving his body, is yet very close to us, for he has become not just a general influence: he has taken his station in the subtle-physical plane and will remain there until his work is completed. The Mother too is surely poised on the same plane to work along with the Master towards the fulfilment of their mission. Besides, we have had the Supermind partially manifested in the subtle-physical layer of the earth since 29 February 1956 and pressing gradually towards manifestation in the gross-physical layer. There is also what the Mother called the Superman-Consciousness which came at the end of 1965 to push the earth forward. So the Mother has left powerful allies for us in addition to the fact that she, together with Sri Aurobindo, is inwardly watchful over all our needs. If we keep the flame of our aspiration bright, we may legitimately remain hopeful of progress towards the Great Goal in spite of its complete attainment having been deferred until such time as the reappearance of Sri Aurobindo or the Mother, if not of both, in the midst of aspiring mankind.
However, the fact still stands that the Mother has physically withdrawn herself and that because of her withdrawal the crowning phase of the Integral Yoga has come in for postponement. This fact should give pause to the idea often put forth that now, with the Mother's freedom from attending to her body, her power over the earth has increased: she can act now with unhampered universality. But surely all the power she can exercise now on the universal scale was always there? There was always the Universal Mother as well as the Transcendent Mother in addition to the Individual Mother as manifested in a physical body. The embodied individual Mother's working put no bar to the working of her
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other aspects. They were not impeded in any way. Her embodiment was something extra - it was a special focus of her for direct and immediate earth-work. By its means she could get in touch better than otherwise with the most exterior part of earth's life - and, conversely, this part could get in touch with her divinity as never before. Such outermost inter-contact - either by letter or word of mouth or thought-transference - is now gone. How can one help missing that down-to-earth relationship? Particularly those who, more than the rest, used to be in physical proximity to the Mother feel most the absence of it.
Take my own case. Not only was I, along with a small group, in the Mother's presence or ambience on the first floor of the main building from about 9 a.m. to nearly 12.30 p.m. Somehow it happened that I continued to be on this floor even after everybody else had left. I would sit on the mat in the passage between the Mother's bathroom and the staircase to the first floor, while she had her lunch with Pranab behind a screen at the end of the room from which she could go up to her retiring room on the second floor. I could hear all the talk going on between the two and sometimes their discussion of certain situations taught me the special tactful way she dealt with them, but, as I was not supposed to hear anything, it has all been put in my brain's archives of privacy. In any case this overhearing was not what mattered to me in my personal relationship with the Mother. What mattered was the fact that almost daily I would write a note to her, put it under a paper-weight on a table on the hither-side of the screen and go back to my seat on the mat of the passage. After her lunch, the Mother would pick up my note, take it to her bathroom from a door on the side which did not face the passage, be there for some time, then come out of the passage-door and meet me. She would either bring a written answer or convey her comment to me verbally. I could have further talk too. At the end of this meeting all alone, naturally most enjoyable for me, she would go for her short siesta and I hurry home where my wife had kept my
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lunch waiting. This would be at about 1.30 p.m.
May I relate a most memorable incident that took place during the hour from 12.30? Once I got a little sleepy sitting in the passage and went to sit in Sri Aurobindo's room. I lost track of time. Suddenly I felt that there was a figure outside the room, close to the farther doorway which is near the small end-room serving as Nirodbaran's office. I turned and found the Mother standing. Hastily I got up and rushed towards her and asked: "Mother, what are you doing here?" She coolly replied: "I came to look for you. Not finding you at your usual place I knew you would be in Sri Aurobindo's room." I felt overwhelmed by her solicitude and apologised for having left my seat. We both walked, talking, to the passage. She went for her rest and I to my flat.
Most probably we walked hand in hand, for I had always the urge to catch her hand. On several occasions when I was on my knees before her and had moved slightly aside to let Champaklal or someone else talk with her, I would gently hold the hand hanging by her side. What was most delightful to me was not just my clasp on her - it was the immediate response of her fingers, her spontaneous return of the sweet warm privacy ventured by me. Her talk would go on along with the silent exchange as if of equal feeling between the infinitesimal and the infinite.
When I remember all the face-to-face communion between the embodied Divine and my small self in various ways and at diverse times, with all the personal help received by me through such interchange, I cannot but be a little discontented with what goes on in the absence of the Mother's embodiment. Indeed a great deal of positive life goes on and, as she once told me, one could feel her subtle-physical body with great concreteness if one were sufficiently sensitive; yet one can't be so receptive as a rule. Naturally then for people like me the Mother's withdrawal is a heavy loss. And even for those who had less physical contact there is bound to be a difference - whether they acknowledge it or not - by the lack of her action as before from that physical
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focus of her consciousness and force and bliss and beauty.
Hence I do not agree that, as you put it, we are now under "her still more powerful force" or that "she sacrificed the most auspicious day of her bodily transformation with a view to making our integral transformation more feasible". No doubt, I always believe that whatever Sri Aurobindo or the Mother did was done for the benefit of their children on the path towards the Divine; but my understanding of the benefit from the Mother's acceptance of death tends to be as follows. Because of allowing unrestrictedly, for the first time in human history, the Superrnind's tremendous action in her body during old age, the Mother had reached a dire physical state from which there appeared to be no real turn for the better, though she would persist for whatever small amelioration could be obtained for a time. Furthermore, I surmise that she had come to know the answer to the question which she had put to the Lord, whether or not her body would go successfully to the end. The secret so far hidden from her was now known - namely, that the Will of the Supreme - her own transcendent self - was that her present body would not serve for the final supramentalisation. She could have gone on for some time more but the state in which she was would not have been to the benefit of the Ashram. Her physical condition about which Pranab spoke in a talk soon after her departure was a severe strain on her children and so she removed the irremediable burden at a moment she thought tit.
According to me, things being what they were, she considered it spiritually advantageous for the Ashram to lose her bodily presence. Besides, she had brought about the manifestation of the Supramental Light, Consciousness and Force in the earth's "atmosphere" as she put it, so that by an evolutionary process the Supermind was certain to create the Superman in the course of the ages. Once, referring to this manifestation, she even said her work was essentially finished. Against the background of February 29,1956 the postponement of the physical transformation which she was
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endeavouring to pioneer in our own day for the sake of mankind would not matter in the long run. Is it not illogical to hold that such transformation has been hastened for us by her departure and that it is even likely in the life-time of some of us?
The Mother's grace has made the Ashram flourish even in her absence and it has become increasingly a centre for the earth's peoples to flock to and inwardly profit there from the Divine Presence she has subtly established, a Presence most effectively radiating from the Samadhi where her body and Sri Aurobindo's have been enshrined. But I cannot say that the intensity of the spiritual life has actually increased on the whole as a result of the Mother's demise. Mind my phrase "on the whole". For some to have been thrown back upon themselves by the absence of the Mother in the flesh must have served as an incentive to more consecrated effort. But it would be an exaggeration to affirm that by and large there has been a greater measure than before of such effort.
I shall leave the complex subject at this point - for you to get whatever new perspective you may derive from my personal vision of things.
(2.4.1991)
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26
You have sent me quite a tale "of woes crying out for panaceas:
"1) How to get rid of the wrench we feel when relations and friends, after spending some time, leave us?
2)How to get rid of useless thoughts and the nervousness that accompanies something we don't remember and we chide ourselves for forgetting it?
3)How to get rid of the remorse we feel when we forget to ask important questions to a friend Like Amal Kiran?
4)How to get back the equipoise we lose when someone near and dear dies and we feel we didn't do enough for him or her?
5)How to prevent ourselves from being shaken in the event of a friend committing suicide?
6)How to get over the terrible nervous instability in the being, followed by a fear of the unknown, which is felt round or above the navel?"
You remind me in general of St. Augustine who in a famous passage started with saying "Life miserable, life blind, life uncertain" and then listed various ills and ended with what he seemed to think the greatest of them: "Like a thief Death steals upon all these ills." But St. Augustine also wrote those profound words addressed to God, which I have loved to quote again and again and which point to the fundamental cause of all our discontents and sufferings and offer the sole basic remedy for them: "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." Apart from the common slashes of life he had one great inner trouble. In spite of having a keen philosophical mind which could distinguish the truths and virtues to be pursued, he was racked by an extreme sensuality. He wanted to control it yet found it most alluring. Hence his celebrated paradoxical prayer: "O Lord, give me chastity - but not yet!" When he succeeded in leaving his passionately loved mistress and fate
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freed him from his attachment to his dear son by her because of the boy's death and he took wholly to the spiritual life, his deep lament was: "Too late have I loved Thee, O Beauty of ancient days who art ever new, too late have 1 loved Thee!" He was thirty-three at that time. I believe you and I were luckier than he. I came to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at the age of twenty-three. I am sure you came to them even earlier. So we found sooner than St. Augustine the master-key to the problem of human existence which had irked us despite our having been quite young - the master-key which Sri Krishna holds forth in the Gita: "You who have come into this transient and unhappy world, love and worship Me." Yes, we were very lucky, but it is one thing for the inmost soul to have discovered the Secret of Secrets and another for the rest of our being to repeat the discovery. I had my tremendous ecstasies and still could not cope with the Yoga in all my parts. I plunged back into the chequered common life and went through diverse difficulties - but after 1 had prayed to the Mother at the time of parting: "Even if I tend to give you up, please never give me up." She said: "I am Like a fairy godmother. 1 can grant all wishes. If you want to be free from me, I can make you so. But if you want me to keep a hold on you, I shall do it always." Ultimately her promise was fulfilled and, thanks to her grace, all my parts have learned to seek the Light. I say "seek" and not "reach", for quite a lot in me falls short of the ideal, but every part feels at its centre the call of the Light and the long arduous way ahead of my infirm steps does not prevent the pilgrim's face from quietly smiling all the time.
Is this my answer to your six questions? Basically, yes. For, to let some response to the awakened soul take place in one's whole nature helps to cut the ground from under every difficulty, every malaise." But I shall try to deal briefly with each particular point you have raised.
If one has not attained an inner detachment which enables one to appreciate and enjoy the company of one's relations and friends without feeling deprived of them when
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they leave, one should develop a sense of them within oneself, a closeness warmly felt so that the outer separation never overwhelms one. Indeed, if one truly cherishes anybody, their presence is never lost and one keeps drawing sweetness from the thought of them. To put it the other way round, the thought of them immediately projects one into their company. And this is no mere fancy. There is a mind-space in which one can move freely even though our mind's e'nsheathment in a physical form prevents one from fully realising the fact. A further step is that, while holding relations and friends vividly within, there is a movement of offering them to the Divine. Such a movement ensures a sense of security for them and lessens the worry which one's affection for them brings about. Again, as the Divine is known to be everywhere and therefore always with one, one acquires the feeling that they are safely linked to one's heart in their subtle beings.
Getting rid of useless thoughts is a matter of practice. You can't just wish them away. I know of two methods against them. One is to cultivate a standing apart from them so that for lack of attention their stream dwindles or, even if they persist, you are separate from them. You can make the separation more distant by bringing in a preoccupying idea. Set before yourself the serene compassionate eyes of Sri Aurobindo, I remember two passages from my poems which are relevant here. Quite appropriate is the moving line:
O perfect one with the all-forgiving face!
Then there is the rapturous description:
The "blinded cry" of the body does not refer directly to Sri Aurobindo's own physical self. It hits off the general human condition which feels a perfection somewhere to be attained
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but keeps fumbling for it unceasingly. In Sri Aurobindo it discovers the sight and the light - the hidden divine truth behind the evolving human is caught in its fullness and in a concentrated form in that tranquil countenance in which the entire broken history of mankind becomes a single shining whole of a knowledge penetrating all problems and a love whose purity, intensity and widensss can suffuse all sorrow and raise every striving spirit to its highest possibility. The inner evocation of Sri Aurobindo's face is the second method completing and transfiguring the first.
As for failing to remember something and becoming nervous about it, I often miss words or phrases in poetic passages that have stuck in my memory, but I don't get nervous about them. There is a touch of mild annoyance at times, but I have noticed that the best way is to do one of two things. Either I make a gesture of pushing the "blanks" backward as if into the subliminal depths and asking for a response from these recesses which are said never to forget anything - or else I offer the "blanks" to the Mother just as I do everything else, particularly whatever in ordinary circumstances would tend to hurt me. Before the emotive reaction might occur, the matter is removed from the personal plane and woven into the sadhana of "Remember and offer". Of course, the "blanks" are merely brief inconveniences and can be tackled with ease. The nervousness you speak of is absolutely out of place. And the calmer you are, the sooner will they be filled either by the subliminal that is our own natural background or by the suprabminal that is the Mother, the Power by whose help we hope to succeed all round in what Srinivasa Iyengar would term "beyonding ourselves". Within a short time the answer arrives. An extra aid would be to keep repeating the general context of the missing matter. This practice got -me through the difficulty of recalling the first adjective - "miserable" - in St. Augustine's jeremiad about "life". In less than half a minute I was out of what you would consider the "misery" of forgetting "miserable".
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Your third item is given by you a more serious look than it merits. It becomes really serious if, instead of Amal Kiran being involved, we have Sri Aurobindo in mind. I have often been gnawed by "remorse" for not asking him for clarifications of certain aspects of his philosophy or certain turns of expression in his poetry. One philosophical problem is: "What carries Karmic impressions from life to life?" I don't recall any direct answer in the Master's works. In the Mother's I have come across just one passage1 directly bearing on the problem. Here it is:
Q: Sri Aurobindo says that some time after death the vital and mental sheaths dissolve, leaving the soul free to retire to the psychic world before it takes up new sheaths. What happens about the Karma and about the impressions - Samskaras - on the old sheaths? Do they also dissolve without producing any result, good or had, which they should according to the theory of Karma? Also, what becomes of the vital and mental beings after the dissolution of the vital and mental sheaths?
A: The outer form only dissolves, unless that too is made conscious and is organised round the divine centre. But the true mental, the true vital and even the true subtle-physical persist: it is that which keeps all the impressions received in earthly life and builds the chain of Karma.
Now, wouldn't this answer by the Mother mean; "Our true beings - subtle-physical, vital, mental - remain the same for us from life to life down the ages. They, no less than our psychic being, have continuous survival. And the psychic being picks them up while acquiring new subtle-physical, vital and mental sheaths to accompany the physical body into which it is born."? When I turn to Sri Aurobindo I don't get quite the same picture. He2
1.Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 134.
2.Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 22, p. 434.
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analogous vein: 'The soul gathers the essential elements of its experiences in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up with its mental, vital, physical sheaths so much of its Karma as is useful to it in the new life for further experience" Here there is no pointer to where the Karma resided and to any compulsive chain of Karma: the soul picks and chooses to serve its own purpose. Will any intellectual of our Ashram shed light in terms of the Aurobindonian philosophy?
One of my literary difficulties are a number of lines in an early poem of Sri Aurobindo's. They occur in "Night by the Sea":
O her name that to repeat
Than the Dorian muse more sweet
Could the white hand more relume
Writing and refresh the bloom
Of lips that used such syllables then,
Dies unloved by later men. (Collected Poems, p. 17)
There is even a whole little piece, ''Miracles", whose central theme is still opaque to me:
Snow in June may break from Nature,
Ice through August last,
The random rose may increase stature
In December's blast;
But this at least can never be,
O thou mortal ecstasy.
That one should live, even in pain,
Visited by thy disdain. (Ibid., p. 48)
What is this "mortal ecstasy"? Some occasions in Savitri too need for me Sri Aurobindo's comment. But I came upon them after he had passed away. Whatever was available to me earlier I consulted him about in case of difficulty or uncertainty. Yet several matters elsewhere were missed.
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Take these lines from Aswapati's speech to the Divine Mother:
The splendid youth of Time has passed and failed;
Heavy and long are the years our labour counts
And still the seals are firm upon man's soul
And weary is the ancient Mother's heart.
O Truth defended in thy secret sun, '
Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens
On things withdrawn within her luminous depths,
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride, *
Linger not long with thy transmuting hand
Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time,
As if Time dare not open its heart to God.
(Part One, p. 345)
Now in the lines -
O Truth defended in thy secret sun,
Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens -
who is indicated by "her"? The apostrophised "Truth" is of course the "Voice" - but whose voice is it? Two lines later we have
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe...
So "her" can't refer to this "Mother" who is directly addressed. The only possibility seems to be in the line preceding the apostrophe to "Truth":
Surely the ancient Mother can't be the one who is directly spoken to as "O Wisdom-Splendour"? But how shall we conceive "her mighty musings in shut heavens" as having that ""Truth" as her "Voice"? And is this apostrophised
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"Truth" different from the "Wisdom-Splendour"? It can't, since Aswapati is throughout addressing the "Mother of the universe". "The ancient Mother" may be thought of as at the same time the Earth-Spirit and the Earth-Spirit's inmost and ultimate reality to whom a general allusion is made in the lines just before the beginning of our passage:
All heavenly light shall visit the earth's thoughts,
The might of heaven shall fortify earthly hearts;
Earth's deeds shall touch the superhuman's height,
Earth's seeing widen into the infinite.
Perhaps my suggestion is supported by lines in an early part of the poem:
Along a path of aeons serpentine
In the coiled blackness of her nescient course
The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.
A Being is in her whom she hopes to know,
A Word speaks to her heart she cannot hear,
A Fate compels whose form she cannot see.
(Part One, p. 50)
The final secret reality of this Earth-Goddess or Earth-Spirit may be the one whose "mighty musings" are in "shut heavens". But then what is the relationship of that reality with the invoked "Truth" and "Wisdom-Splendour" and "the Eternal's artist Bride" who is the "Mother of the universe"? Is the former the supreme unmanifest Shakti-essence whose divine revelation is the latter and whose cover down below in the evolving world is the Earth-Goddess, the Earth-Spirit?
Is any light- shed on my conjecture by the several later references to the ancient Mother in Savitri? -
Abandoning man's loud drama he had come
Led by the wisdom of an adverse Fate
To meet the ancient Mother in her groves.
(Part Two, p. 393)
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The ancient Mother faces all with joy,
Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;
(Ibid., p. 444)
The Ancient Mother clutched her child to her breast
Pressing her close in her environing arms,
(Ibid., p. 551)
The ancient Mother offered to her child
Her simple world of kind familiar things.
(Ibid., p. 578)
I will bear with him the ancient Mother's load,
I will follow with him earth's path that leads to God.
(Ibid., p. 590)
It appears to me that the ancient Mother's identity with the "Earth-Goddess" is briefly flashed out in the lines of scornful Yama to Savitri:
What shall the ancient goddess give to thee
Who helps thy heart-beats? Only she prolongs
The nothing dreamed existence...
(Ibid., p. 586)
In spite of all this argument I feel I am basically swimming in conjectures. I wish I could have posed my question to Sri Aurobindo when he was still at the other end of a correspondence. Your frustrated feeling, however, is uncalled for. You can always write to me: you can even run down to Pondicherry. That's why you need not be woe-begone for having forgotten at any time to tap your old friend - tottering in his lower half but very far still from doddering in his upper.
Question No. 4 touches on a universal poignancy. We take life too much for granted and don't take all the opportunities possible to give love enough. At some place Sri Aurobindo has written to a disciple about this kind of sorrow added to the sheer sorrow for death. It is easy to lose one's
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equanimity In such a situation, but it is not by losing it that we can make amends. If the dead person has loved us he or she is not likely to be happy over our wretchedness. The only way to make amends is to give love to the departed person. Never think that the passage to the dead is blocked. As long as they are accessible to the living - and surely up to a certain time they are - the best course is to attend to the Mother's words in the set of question and answer I am quoting below:
Q:Sweet Mother, how should the news of death be received, especially when it is someone close to us?
A: Say to the Supreme Lord: "Let Thy will be done", and remain as peaceful as possible.
If the departed one is a person one loves, one should concentrate one's love on him in peace and calm, for that is what can most help the one who has departed.
(16 January 1970)
The subject of suicide which your fifth question raises is a complicated one. We look in a confused manner at the act of killing oneself. We think of it as being in the same category as murder - only it is taken to be murder of oneself instead of somebody else. No doubt, we pity the person who has committed such violence against himself, but we still consider it a crime. The common law persists in this view and therefore seeks to punish the one who has attempted suicide. Actually the punishment is for the failure to commit the so called crime. The idea is to frighten the criminal off from attempting to repeat the act. But surely one who is bent on ridding himself of his body cannot be frightened: he will only take care to be more efficient in the next experiment. But of course the initial failure may make him change his mind and see differently the tangle of things which drove him to the drastic method of extricating himself from it. The attitude of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is not the conventional one. The notion of criminality is far from it. Hence too the idea that here what is within the rights of an individual is
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trespassed. But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother point out certain unfavourable psychological and evolutionary circumstances resulting from an abrupt exit due to desperation. Their calm, clear, compassionate analysis of the complex problem involved is before us in two letters written to Huta by the Mother dated 21.12.1960 and 16.3.1961 {White Roses in facsimile, pp. 122 and 130).
. My dear little child,
It is your full right to refuse to live in this world if you do not like it.
But to get out of it, is not so easy as you think. Death is not the solution, far from it. Death is a clumsy and mechanical return to the endless round of existences and what you have not achieved in one life, you have to do in the second, generally in much more difficult circumstances. The feelings that are weighing upon you now are surely the result of a previous failure and if, once more, you accept the defeat, next time it will surely be still worse.
There is only one way of getting free from life altogether, it is to go to Nirvana, and this can be obtained only by a very strict tapasya of complete detachment.
There is also another and more simple way of getting out of trouble, it is to take refuge in the Divine's love.
With my blessings.
... Death is not at all what you believe it to be. You expect from death some neutral quietness of an unconscious rest. But to obtain that rest you must prepare for it, When one dies, one leaves or loses only one's body and, at the same time, the possibilities of relation with and of action on the material world.
All that belongs to the vital plane does not disappear with the material substance, and all the desires, attachments, cravings, persist with the sense of frustration and disappointment, and all that keeps you restless and
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prevents you from getting the expected peace.
To enjoy a peaceful and eventless death you must prepare for it. And the only effective preparation is the abolition of desires, a steady detachment from the fruit of action.
So long as we have a body, we have to act, to do something, to work; but if we work simply because it has to be done, without seeking for the results of our action or wanting it to be like this or like that, little by little we get detached and prepare ourselves progressively for a truly restful death.
In fact, if you do not expect any satisfaction from physical life, you are no more tied to it and get above all sorrows.
I may add that the Mother, elsewhere in her writings, has discerned the play of a dramatic impulse in the self-destructive move, which may be contributing a tinge of self-satisfaction to it. I am also told that somewhere Sri Aurobindo says that when one after a long eventful life feels a rounding-off to it one may, in view of the uselessness of further prolonging it, opt for a voluntary departure.
Here there would be no association of despair. And this fact brings me to instances of suicide beyond the run-of-the-mill kind. There can go with self-destruction a truly high drama and not the self-satisfying dramatic impulse which the Mother has seen in the ordinary suicide. The high drama would be born from a blend of courage and duty. Thus, during World War II, the captain of the German pocket battleship "Bismarck", after his charge had been destroyed by the British Navy in the Atlantic and he had been taken captive, took advantage of a solitary spell in his room to spread the German flag on the floor, stand in the middle of it and fire a pistol into his head. The code of military honour demanded such an end and we cannot help admiring it. On a grand scale we have the historical (and far from hysterical) self-immolation of the Rajput women by fire to avoid falling
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into the hands of Muslim conquerors. Even a rare genuine case of sati, as in ancient times, has a halo about it, a soul-splendour whose outer aspect has been poetically visioned in those Lines in Butler's Hudibras:
Indian widows gone to bed,
In flaming curtains, with the dead.
Then there are the great scenes of Antony and Cleopatra, as Shakespeare has intuited them. Hating the idea of being captured by the victorious Octavius Caesar and heart-broken on hearing the report, which later turned out to be false, of Cleopatra's death, Antony runs upon his sword which he makes his attendant hold straight before him and hurts himself fatally, his life lasting only up to the time he is carried to Cleopatra's side. After his death, Cleopatra, scorning the prospect of being made prisoner by Octavius, applies an asp to her breast and addresses it:
Come, thou mortal wretch.
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie; poor venemous fool,
Be angry and despatch....
Sri Aurobindo, discussing "nobility" of poetic style with me, wrote: "Cleopatra's words are an example of what I mean: the disdainful compassion for the fury of the chosen instrument of self-destruction which vainly thinks it can truly hurt her, the call to death to act swiftly and yet the sense of being high above what death can do, which these few simple words convey has the true essence of nobility. 'Impatience' only! You have not caught the significance of the words 'poor venemous fool', the tone of the 'Be angry, and despatch', the sense and noble grandeur of the suicide scene with the high light it sheds on Cleopatra's character. For she was a remarkable woman, a great queen, a skilful ruler and politician, not merely the erotic intriguer people make of her." .
So much for remarks in a broad vein on the subject. You
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couldn't have bargained for them, but I just wanted to put before you my understanding of it. And 1 shall end with two personal opinions. One is a deduction from the Mother's first letter. The Mother seldom commits herself to absolute statements and I would like to cast a passing glance at the adverb "generally" when she says: "...what you have not achieved in one life, you have to do it in the second, generally in much more difficult circumstances." Evidently, the disciple who is said to be in a despairing and desperate condition because of "a previous failure" - that is, a past shirking of the problem by the same means of self-undoing as thought of now - the disciple cannot be conceived to be in much more difficult circumstances when the problem is confronted within the benevolent helpful presence of the incarnate Divine Mother. But, doubtless, if even now, "once more", the "defeat" is accepted as in the past, then "next time it will surely be still worse". Mark the "surely" in contrast to the earlier "generally". The actual presence of the Supreme in a physical form makes all the difference. If such an act of Grace is wasted, the consequences are bound to be severe.
My next personal opinion is on a matter of psychology. I cannot daub with a sweeping brush as "cowardly" anyone who commits suicide. Self-preservation is the strongest instinct in each of us. To go against it must call for a lot of courage. But 1 do grant that here is a desperate courage - a courage to which one is, as it were, driven, but the mood cannot in my eyes be painted as cowardly in any sense.
Your question is not connected with all these issues. It bears on how one is to face the event of a friend putting an end to his or her life. You speak of one's being "shaken" by it. Let me remind you of what I wrote to you as well as to some others about the death of a young and very dear relative by his own hand two years ago.
I have passed through many deaths, but nobody's caused me such difficulty as this in practising one of the major guide-lines of my sadhana:
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A wide unshaken look on Time's unrest.
When I got the news on the phone, there were no tears but deep within was a terrible wrench and I turned to the photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in front of me and there went out from my heart an appeal of such intensity as I had never felt in my life before in turning to them. All my being swept towards them with but one cry: "O take our laved one and your own child to yourselves!"
Trying to hold the heart-wrench within the mass of peace which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had packed into me and to keep the thought of the lost loved one moving towards the Divine on the constant flow of my feeling towards them which has been going on for years - in trying to do this from hour to hour an extreme withdrawnness and depth-exploration took place, I plunged into a dimension so profound that whatever was still enmeshed in the human, the all-too-human, was pulled out. The ancient Upanishad has said: "When the knot of the heart-strings is rent asunder, then even in this body the mortal enjoys immortality." The "immortality" spoken of is not just the soul's survival of death after death in the course of its many births; it is the never-born and never-dying state which is intrinsically vast and free, luminous and blissful. The way to it is barred by that knot of the heart-strings by which the Immense becomes the little and the Eternal grows bound to the tremors and tensions of life's run from instant to passing instant, the small fluctuations from one transience to another. I can hardly say yet that the Upanishadic Immortality is my glorious home, but a powerful draw in that direction occurred. In the past, in spite of the tranquil background in which the being had stood with the self-offered soul in front facing the personal Godhead, there had been vaguely, dumbly, a sense still of something missing, the lack of a finishing touch, haunting me and often a prayer had arisen: "Make me completely free!" The prolonged inward-going for days and days brought a quietly and effortlessly keen knife to
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the entanglements that had lingered in the diminishing heart-knot. It is as if in a fundamental manner the abrupt end of a cherished one's life had freed me from my old self with a certain finality. I was not rendered cold or self-centred. How can it be so when coldness and self-cenrredness are qualities of the separative ego which is part of the complex formed by that knot? Once that knot is cut, the ego disappears and the true soul behind can find an outlet keeping a touch between the finite world and the unbound Spirit. What happened was that in the midst of all relationships and all commerce with common things there was felt an enormous liberty which the very body had the sensation of distantly sharing. In a most basic manner that tragic death made me die into a new life. .
If such an excruciating event as a dear one's death at quite a young age, all the more excruciating because it is desperately voluntary, if an event so life-shaking does not send us deeper into the Divine, the beloved one has died in vain. Let us not allow a death of this kind to be just a useless calamity. Let it lead us to some great Light and not leave us in a no-man's-land of misery and mystery.
Now a few words on your last "How?" The nervousness in face of the future, the fear that the veil across the time to come would part to disclose some huge undreamed-of disaster, can, in my opinion, be best removed by reading passages from Savitri aloud. The audible reading is necessary in order to set up vibrations in the being. The place where you have the dread of the unknown is the solar plexus and this sensitive mass of nerves is all the time resonating to thoughts, feelings, sensations. Give it the grand rhythms of Sri Aurobindo's "overhead" inspiration to resonate to. When I was in Bombay years ago and was continuing my out-of-body experiences which had developed in Pondicherry after one pre-Pondi surprise, once I was very badly attacked from behind by hostile forces of an occult plane. I felt as if my whole spine had been broken and an indescribable malaise suffused my entire system, I wondered what to do. I recollected that certain passages in Savitri had distinctly - as Sri
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Aurobindo had confided to me - what he had termed the Overmind accent, which is the power of the sheer Mantra. Particularly so was the group of lines which described Savitri herself. It begins at nearly the bottom of p. 14 (Centenary Edition) with the line
Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven
and closes in the opening part of p. 16 with the phrase
In her he met his own eternity.
The "he" is the God of Love whom Savitri came on earth to manifest against the power of Death. I started reading this passage in a clear tone to myself, giving full scope to its sound-suggestion. When I came to the line -
For even her gulfs were secrecies of light -
I suddenly found myself cured of the pervading malaise and the sense of the broken backbone was totally gone. I may add that A.E. Housman used to say that he knew he was in the presence of poetry when what he read brought tears to his eyes, made his hair stand on end and his solar plexus felt pierced. Sri Aurobindo, after reading Housman, referred to the solar plexus apropos of his process of getting the correct version in his epic and removing defects by "a word or phrase substitute that flashes - with the necessary sound and sense". He went on to say: "These things are not done by thinking or seeking for the right thing - the two agents are sight and call. Also feeling - the solar plexus has to be satisfied and, until it is, revision after revision has to continue." So I beheve that the mantric intensities of Savitri will deal successfully with your nervous trouble "round or above the navel". To meet your "fear of the unknown", what can be a better remedy than this revelatory poem which may be best summed up in one of its own lines as being
A message from the unknown immortal Light?
(25.5.1990)
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As you are yourself a painter I think you will be interested in knowing the background to the scene Jayantilal has depicted of the Mother taking up the development of a number of budding artists in the early 'thirties of this century. Jayantilal, a fine artist himself, deals in particular with his friend who was also my friend, the gentle and devoted Sanjiban, who passed away recently in the Ashram Nursing Home while I was there too, lying under complicated traction for a multiple fracture of the thigh-bone where it makes a joint with the shin. The article is well done and brings out effectively the right psychology of art in the Ashram and the Mother's way of fostering it. It is authoritative on the period with which it concerns itself, but it creates the impression that before the youngsters - "Anil Kumar, Sanjiban, Chinmayi and one or two others including Tajder", as Jayantilal lists them, seeming to forget the youngest, Romen - came under the Mother's wings the state of art in the Ashram was a howling desert.
Why it could not have been so may be inferred from the fact that some preliminaries of perspective were shown to Romen and Anil Kumar by Amal Kiran! In the course of time either of them proved a much more competent artist than I could have ever developed into. But the fact remains that for several years before the Mother took up the artistic education of the sadhaks in Jayantilal's list, she concerned herself with the Parsi newcomer - 23 years old when he entered the Ashram - in whom she detected the capacity to draw and paint.
In the early days when I used to watch people meditate with the Mother rather than do meditation myself, I made a series of sketches of many of them and put short sentences below my pictures. I had seen Purani's neck grow twice its normal width when he had plunged into meditation. Something from above his head appeared to be descending into
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him with tremendous weight, as it were, and his neck had to bulge out all round most spectacularly in order to hold the descent. Later I came to know that the descent could be like a bar of steel entering the head and sending one dizzy at first. My witticism below the little sketch of Purani ran: "Purani trying hard to swallow the Supermind." I remember my picture of the old American Vaun MacPheeters staring grimly in front of him with fixed eyes and set mouth. He earned the comment: "Vaun hypnotising the Absolute into submission." Another cartoon that comes up in my memory is of the young Muslim Ishak, renamed Prashanta. He used to take a posture of absorbed self-giving, losing all grip on himself, the face bent as far as possible over his right shoulder as if it hung loose there. Below it stood the gloss: "Prashanta in a state of dislocated devotion."
My drawings were seen by Purani and a few others, but we were afraid of letting the Mother see them lest she should frown at fun made of so serious a matter as spirituality. I did not know at that time how witty a person she was and how she would have marked the technique of what had been drawn well. I recollect the keen attention she paid to the way I had sketched the chair on which she used to sit during her lunch-hour. My wife and I wanted to present her with another such chair. So, with Champaklal, an artist in his own right, helping me with accessories, I had drawn the Mother's chair with due attention to all the niceties of perspective. There was welcome given also to a series I had done in ink after an injury to my left knee from a fall. 1 was partly immobilised with synovitis, but had recovered sufficiently to think of attending somehow a little concert which had been arranged in the Meditation Hall downstairs in the Ashram's main building, with the Mother presiding over it. My gurus were in doubt about my scheme. So to set their minds at rest I drew how I would get with a backward movement into the vehicle then in use called Push-push - and next how I would hold up straight with a hand the injured leg - and then start on my drive to the Ashram with my hair standing up with a
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bit of pain and my friend Ambu tripping ahead of the Push-push carrying my crutches aloft, each in either hand, while behind my vehicle would come with long strides the old big-built physician famous in the Ashram as "Doctor-babu", his right hand combing with its fingers his abundant white beard flowing down his bare torso. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were convinced of the viability of my plan. My sheet of drawing came back the next morning with a line written in Sri Aurobindo's small neat hand: "Seen and appreciated."
To return to the early days soon after my first plunge into drawing in the Ashram. One evening while the usual small group had gathered round the Mother in the Prosperity Room before the Soup Distribution downstairs a little later, the Mother suddenly asked me: "Will you draw and paint the various flowers I give to people every morning at Pranam?" I was rather surprised and replied: "Mother, how do you assume that I can do such a thing?" She answered: "1 know by looking at your right hand. It is quite clear to me." I was happy to take up the work.
In parenthesis I may say that object-drawing was no new thing for me. I had been addicted to pencil and brush since my boyhood. I had even passed the so-called Intermediate Examinadon in Art with a prize for the memory-drawing of a huge gorilla! Indeed at one period of my life I was posed with a choice between developing as an artist and devoting myself to writing. The enthusiasm to be an artist was most intense when, at the age of 6,I was taken out of India by my doctor-father, along with my mother, for treatment to my left leg which had been affected by polio three years earlier. London was our destination but we had a halt in Paris where we visited various picture-galleries. In one of them I saw a number of artists on high ladders which took them to paintings hung on the walls. They must be either copying the paintings or touching them up where they had faded. The sight of these men, with berets on their heads and palettes in their hands, fired my fancy so much that I could not think of a more romantic job when I would grow up. But in my
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middle teens I got the feeling that I would never do anything absolutely original and first-rate in painting, whereas there were fair possibilities of my growing into an effective writer. So I practically gave up the art-career which had seemed open to me, and yet I cherished the dream that towards the end of my life I would have a studio and paint away. One of the projects I had conceived quite early during my stay in the Ashram was to make a painting for each of the poems which had won high praise from Sri Aurobindo. Under the encouragement of the sadhika whom jayantilal has mentioned as "Tajdar" I made two paintings, one of a poem called "Creators" and the other of a poem entitled "Two Birds", an old Upanishadic theme. Both the pictures were seen by the Mother several years later and she praised them for what may be termed their vivid symbolic and atmospheric suggestion. The rest of my poetic work remains un-illustrated. 1 am fairly old - 87 years of age hut the vision of a studio is still unrealised.
After the Mother had appointed me the Ashram's flower-painter she presented me with drawing-books and a paintbox, as well as small drawing-pads she had brought from Japan, made by a firm styled "Bumpodo". Every week she would look at my work. I got an insight into her way of judging from the remarks she made. There were paintings which 1 thought I had done very efficiently. She did not pause over them. There were others which did not have what I could have called the finishing touch and yet she smiled happily at the sight of them and passed appreciative remarks. The fact was that when doing these pieces I had a special warmth and glow in my heart in relation to her while the others had not been surrounded with as much of an inner attitude. The former must have spoken to her directly while the latter took her somewhat as part of the world in general.
Here a side-story which has nothing to do with painting as such will not be out of place as it shows an aspect of the Mother and is apropos of an item connected with my paraphernalia as a painter. There was a tube of pink water-
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colour which had somehow come up for inspection. I unscrewed it and for some reason smelt the paint and exclaimed: "It has such an appetising smell!" At once the Mother seemed to recoil and sharp words came out of her: "Never talk to me of food and eating!" My wife and I were both taken aback. Then my wife picked up the tube from where I had put it down and started pressing it somewhere near the nozzle. The Mother at once took her to task, remarking: "I can see that you have never been taught painting." Obviously we were not under fortunate stars on this occasion.
Besides the daily painting of individual flowers, I was asked to combine several and paint them skilfully intertwined to match the sentences which the Mother had composed for the ensembles. Very carefully the Mother had collected the sheets - smaller in size than the ones in the standard drawing-books - and kept them with her wrapped in a silk handkerchief. I have no idea where at present this collection may be.
Another job set me by the Mother was to prepare small-size paintings of individual flowers with their specific meanings typed below - paintings which were meant to be affixed to the walls of certain rooms. Thus a flower which looked like a rose but was not a rose had been dubbed "Falsehood". Its picture was put up in the Reading Room where the daily newspapers used to be spread out on mats every morning. I must have prepared a number of such labels. I don't remember any other label of room-significance except the one the Mother made me do for my own room. The flower she chose here signified: "Krishna's Light in the mind."
Some other jobs also came my way. I had to make designs for the bands round the Mother's head - either when she wore a sari or when she wore just a "kitty-cap" going with kamis and salwar. Designs had to be prepared also for borders to the Mother's saris. Vasudha and her companions made embroideries from them. Once I remembered to have been
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asked to draw a peacock on a large sheet of paper to serve as a model for a curtain. My official career for such work ended when Sanjiban and some others joined the Ashram and were available for various drawing and painting work. I may conclude my tale by mentioning that I did a few portraits too. Once in the evening gathering in the Prosperity Room it happened that both the Mother and I started sketching the face of Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St-Hilaire). She did the front face while I attempted the profile. She used swift bold strokes in contrast to my method of slow delicate lines. I seemed to be after precise resemblance, she cared more for general striking suggestion. Once 1 followed her way and sketched my own self - bearded at that time - and put some colour on the portrait. But, though people have liked it, 1 considered my own "masterpiece" to be a side-face drawing of a young Bengali girl named Savitri who was studying English under me. I called this picture: "Savitri on the verge of meditation." Both the portraits have somehow survived the sweep of the tides of time, whereas it has left no trace of a sketch I did of a Gujarati friend - Girdharlal - who was quite a character. A calculating worldly-wise strain bordered the basic spiritual aspirant in him and I rather piquantly flashed it out without really submerging the latter. I imagine his sense of humour enjoyed the double disclosure. Along with the pair of paintings I did of two poems of mine, the sketches of myself and my student are the sole signs today of my life as the Mother's earliest artist from a period when none of the sadhaks and sadhikas counted by Jayantilal had taken up pencil or brush and the one on whom the Mother as artist-moulder spent later the most time - Huta - was indeed a far cry. Huta whom the Mother assiduously taught and inspired to paint Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri belongs to the late 'fifties and after, but she happens to be perhaps the single friend in relation to whom the generally forgotten proto-artist of the Ashram has lingered in stray action on private occasions.
(9.3.1992)
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Your note runs: "I am working in an office that is infested with cockroaches. The place has been sprayed many times by management but to no avail. We have been unable to get rid of these pests. They crawl about over our papers and documents and food. Virtually every day I am killing these creatures. What is the karmic effect of this? Will this hamper, obstruct and delay my union with the psychic being and with the Divine?"
The killing of creatures that are pests is unavoidable. By itself such killing cannot have adverse karmic effects. But the manner and attitude with which we kill must have significance. The manner has to be swift. Out of any hesitation we should not do the killing in an inept fashion, leaving the unfortunate creature struggling and suffering until a second hit puts it out of whatever pangs it may be capable of. A single skilful swipe should finish the job. As for the attitude, a bit of excitement of the hunt is unavoidable but if it has some exultation in it we lower ourselves. Our minds should be calm and, in the very act of killing, we should offer not only our act but also the being of the victim to the Divine Compassion. Then our consciousness is not caught up in the work of extermination although it is directed towards it and does not wander away, rendering the work a fumble or a mess.
In fact, all work and not merely this has to be related to our consciousness in the same way - the way basically of what the Gita calls Karma Yoga, which in the Gita's synthe-sizing sweep merges in its core with the fundamental movements of the Yoga of Knowledge, Jnana Yoga, as well as the Yoga of Devotion, Bhakti Yoga. The directed skill of the deed, the inner detachment, the surrender of the deed and of the object involved in the doing, to a supreme Being with the aspiration that this Being may make us the channel of his Truth-Consciousness - such is the full mode of the Gita tending towards the Aurobindonian sadhana. What would turn that mode into the latter is the further ideal of total transformation - the Lord not only acting through us but
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descending into us and remoulding all our parts in the image of their perfect figures already existing in the Truth-Consciousness. Here the central dynamism in us invoking and receiving the Divine is what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother term the Psychic Being, the Soul of us which is stationed in the inmost recesses of the heart-centre, the centre which the Gita seeks to activate through its Yoga of Devotion. The Lord Himself or the Divine Mother or rather the two together as a single Reality are secretly present most luminously with the amalgam of Child and Seer that constitutes the Soul. My whole prayer is to be one with this Seer-Child, the amalgam in which I conceive the true Amal is hidden!
You see how far afield your cockroaches have led us. I may add the remark that the Seer part of the Soul is as important as the Child part. For the archetypal Child is not just the nth degree of the toddlers we were. It is more like Wordsworth's vision of the Child in his "Immortality Ode". He has actually the verbal turn: "Seer blest." Of course, the ordinary child has a delightful innocence, but it has too an amount of ignorance which is akin to the mind of the animals. What makes it worse than they is that the normal child often takes pleasure in killing creatures like cockroaches or even less pestiferous insects and animals. Thus tearing apart the wings of a moth with great glee is very common. Sympathetic identification with one's victim is extremely rare. Even the sight of butchering a living creature is a matter of much interest. Thus, when a boy, I used to enjoy a cook cutting the throats of hens and flinging off the screaming and fluttering birds into the sink. Grown up, I observed with admiration mixed with some amusement my little sister, junior to me by nine years, appealing to my father when he was cleaning up a nest of cockroaches: "O papa, please don't kill baby cockroaches!" I believe little girls are more sensitive than little boys, but by and large the innocence of childhood, though quite genuine, is not unadulteratedly psychic. And it is the play of the true Soul we need in every activity of ours.
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I am tempted to go considerably beyond the topic you have brought up. For the subject of slaughter in general looms before me. First, there is the controversy between meat-eaters and vegetarians. There is the broad question: "Has Nature evolved man as a feeder on flesh or as an eater of vegetables?" One school points to the gorilla - a cousin of ours, according to Darwinism - and preaches vegetarianism to us. The other school points out our canine teeth as Nature's signal that we are historically meat-eaters. There is also the ingenious argument that all animals that drink by licking up fluids with their tongues - dogs as well as lions, for instance - are meat-eaters, whereas those that drink with their mouths - for example, horses and anthropoids - are vegetarians. Man is like the latter and has unnaturally taken to the "flesh-pots". All this is scientific or semi-scientific debate. There is also the moral question - Gandhi's ahimsa or non-violence and Schweitzer's "Reverence for life." But Gandhi went to the extreme of advising Britain not to fight Hitler if he tried to invade her and rather welcome him so as to melt his heart. Gandhi did not realise how Indian spiritual insight has distinguished human ambitions and fighting urges from preternatural forces that seek to act through human beings and even to possess them - forces distinguished as Asura (Titan), Rakshasa (Giant), Pishacha (Demon). Sri Aurobindo knew the distinction and declared his whole-hearted support to a nation against which he had once led a vigorous many-sided opposition in his political days. Nor had his opposition meant always to be nonviolent. His ultimate plan was of an armed insurrection against British rule in India. But he always sought to bring an inner spiritual attitude everywhere. Even war without such an attitude was never ruled out by him: it is often a necessity in the drama of man's.progress. Extreme pacifism would seem to be as mistaken as thoughtless war-mania. A wide and judicious outlook is the desideratum. Something of it in a different strain appears also to have guided Schweitzer. On one occasion he was faced with the problem of feeding an
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eagle which he had saved from death and brought up as a pet. He decided to give it its natural non-vegetarian food. He fed it with fish from a river, saying: "The claims of higher life come before those of lower life."
What about issues like hunting for sport on the one hand and, on the other, animal sacrifices to gods? I find the latter gruesome and degrading, the former exciting but heartless. Then there is the question of vivisection. Darwin, the most gentle of men who would not deliberately hurt a fly, is on record as declaring that one who objects to experiments on living animals for medical research can never be a true friend of humanity. But I am sure Darwin wanted the vivisecting friends of humanity to be as humane as possible in their experiments. In all matters where a necessity of taking life is involved the main object should be avoidance of cruelty and an invocadon of some higher Being's care for the creature destroyed. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother always struck me as free spirits having no fixed notions, no faddism, in issues connected with life and death but always keeping above the level of ordinary psychology and acting in tune with a Consciousness and a Will that have no personal passion, no narrow motive or interest but act according to an inherent light and love.
(16.3.1992)
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Let me hurry up to wish you a birthday which will be - in some words from Savitri -
The "things beyond" are the holy presences in the inmost sanctuary to which the temple-door leads and of which the goldenness of that entrance is the promise, A soul-state of intense yet steady luminosity revealing the Supreme Lord and the Divine Mother as the immortal In-dwellers of our being is the best birthday-realisation I can wish you.
I am sure that nothing less than this can meet the needs of your nature. You are a bom devotee of the Eternal and the Infinite. I think you belong to that rare company to whom instinctive or intuitive movements deep within make, as Wordsworth puts it, .
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence,
and for whom the long littleness of the ordinary life is never final, feeling as they do, with Wordsworth again, that
Whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home
Is with infinitude, and only there.
Of course, the perception of a Splendour in our depths, which is beyond our small outer existence and is yet our own self's secret truth - such a perception does not necessarily mean a neglect by us of all passing and finite matters, for it is in them that the inmost verity's radiance has to be shed. So I should not sound unnatural if from the subject of Spirit and Soul connected with your birthday I make a transition to the theme of the history you have given me of your food-intake
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down the years. Each one has to adjust his food according to his body's reactions. What you have settled upon seems to me a good diet. I don't know why you object to eggs. One egg a day could be a substantial aid to strength, provided you with your slightly uncertain stomach can digest it. I can understand your objection to onions and garlic, but they are not, as you say, "tamasic" or inertia-causing food: they are rajasic or excitement-producing stuff. I personally don't fancy them in general because they affect one's breath and sometimes even one's sweat. This applies to onions only when they are taken raw. My constitution accepts all kinds of food. I don't particularly go after any kind, but welcome whatever is given - and everything is inwardly offered to the Divine Mother with the prayer: "May it all go to the growth of your divinity in me!"
(20.2.1992)
I arrived at my flat on March 17 after five months at the Ashram Nursing Home. Physiotherapy has started in right earnest to make me cope more efficiently with the problems left by the fracture of last October 15. I have renewed my old rhythm in general. The most important note recurring is my daily afternoon-visit to the Samadhi, albeit now in a wheelchair. It's glorious to be there again. In the old days I felt I was inwardly embracing the Samadhi. Now it is as if the Samadhi were inwardly embracing me. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother seem overjoyed to find me back "home" and they press their light upon my head and their love upon my heart without ceasing.
The Divine appears to be more happy in gaining poor infinitesimal Me than I could be in plunging into the inexhaustible splendour of His beatific immensity. The Divine's Grace has always puzzled me at the same time that it has enraptured me. It is as though to get one little kiss from me God enfolds me with a whole cosmos of sunlike warmth and moonlike tenderness and innumerable star-touches of
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thrilling intimacy. I have always felt myself a most unlikely explorer of the mystic consciousness, ever a stranger to the art of detached God-dedicated action, a self-doubter even as a devotee at a Guru's feet and yet all my wandering world-tempted wits have somehow been drawn to Yoga, Turn as often as I may my ears to the song of the sirens, my face has been pulled away again and again in the opposite direction by the strains of a far flute throbbing in earth's air from Brindavan's woods thousands of years ago. I am amazed at this phenomenon.
Not that I am materially minded in contrast to the spiritual temper. 1 am no worshipper of shekels but, as I have often declared, I am by nature a dweller on the left bank of the Seine, the Latin Quarter, the resort of beauty-drunk artists and endless chasers of ideas. The world visible to the sharpened senses, the vast field of the mind's manifold review of things - these were the lures to me. Through curious circumstances I was thrown into a search for the invisible, a grope for the unthinkable. Luckily, they brought me before Sri Aurobindo and face to face with the Mother. Here were beings of flesh and blood, concretely on earth, who yet stood for the Beyond and the Boundless. Because of them I could turn to the spiritual life.
They also showed through their spirituality a firm clasp on the world of form and rhythm that is the delight of the born artist and an equal grip on the sphere of multitudinous interlinked ideas that is the passion of the insatiable thinker. If the Mother had not been a painter and a musician, if Sri Aurobindo had not philosophised and written poetry of both vision and reflection, I would scarcely have made the Ashram my permanent home. And once I chose to live there, they with an incalculable love kept a hold on me. It was a hold I desired because it-was so warm and rich -1 asked for it to continue even if I were to feel Like drifting away to the old non-Yogic life. And now at the Samadhi after five months of absence I experienced once more the sweet eagerness of the Divine to lock me up in His lavish affection as if I were a
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Koh-i-noor, "a mountain of light", instead of being a mere pebble of a disciple whom strange forces had kicked into His courtyard.
Now enough about me. Your news is very cheering. To dip into Savitri anywhere as if it were a book of oracles and read two or three pages with intense pleasure at "the word-music and the tremendously beautiful English" is a great move forward in the re-creation of your inner being. And a step forward too is your trying to add to what you call your "repertoire of heart-sadhana" that dictum of Sri Aurobindo's: "Love the Mother. Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." Whatever renders the Mother an increasingly vivid reality to us is a step ahead on the Aurobindonian path. Your new moves make you a more congenial companion to me in the spiritual search. For, most of my Yoga boils down to conjuring up the Mother before my eyes and steeping myself in the keen memory of that atmosphere of warm wideness and holy soul-building silence which I always felt in her presence.
(26.3.1992)
You say: "I am convinced that your prayers can reach the Mother more easily than mine. So always I have been asking you to give just two minutes for me." I don't understand why you should attach special merit to my prayers. Isn't everybody capable of doing what I do? My method is very natural and simple. Whatever is to be put before the Mother I just carry as if in a void crystal to a great Void beyond my head and there I am lost with it in the Mother's presence for a few minutes. I feel an intense reaching out to her benevolent hands and nothing exists for me then except those hands, all-receiving, all-granting. I do not imagine any answer but wait in a prolonged concentrated hush into which something takes shape at her touch. I don't try to "read" what she has put there. The trying would break the spell. I wait for the end
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of the meeting between my void and her Void. When I am back to myself her reply casts a sort of image on my mind. Sometimes it is very clear and detailed - on other occasions it is rather general but some sort of drift is usually caught. The secret of the prayer is the utter absorption in the appeal, the utter lack of preconception as to the response, the utter undemanding joy in the communion with the supreme Beauty and Beatitude, the utter openness to whatever comes out of their incalculable Grace. The prayer is no casual act. Something goes forth from deep down within, as if one's whole self were gathered into it for a while. What is done is a part of the sadhana and when it is over I am myself a little nearer the Divine at the same time that I have striven to take my friend a bit closer to that inexhaustible Sweetness.
The dream you have recounted is surely not just a throw-up of the subconscient. A few confused elements may be there but by and large it is an experience on an inner plane with a psychic light playing on it. If you found no trace at all of your physical disability, the plane could not be merely the subtle-physical. There, in the midst of a substantial change, some sign however faint of our physical condition is usually present. You were certainly meeting our Gurus and your soul was full of gratitude: that is why you wanted to offer to them the flower signifying Grace in recognition of the great benefit conferred on you, but it is rather a mystery why you could not directly make the offering and had to do it through somebody else. Perhaps a part of you was not wholly given to the opportunity you had been granted. Some hint of this part appears at the end of the dream when comes "the idea of returning home immediately as the train-time was so close". However I feel that the somebody else was not really a non-you. You write that "he accepted" your "request" "with a smile". It seems that he was your own soul which had been slightly separated from your inner state by the lurking anxiety about missing your train - the link with your outer being. The "smile" was a psychic signal, a reassurance that nothing was truly lost. Have I not spoken of your
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"smiling face" as something most characteristic of you the sadhak? Surely it can only be your soul that wears so natural a smile in spite of your terrible handicaps?
(15.4.1992)
Your letter asks me: "What has changed during all these eight years since we last met. You can say: 'Well, I have grown older and more experienced.' Yes, but what does your experience say about supramentalisation and divinisation of the body? How far have we gone in the direction calculated to make us achieve those things - for the rest is all un-important?"
You seem to be getting most things wrong. About my age you say: "You were 29 in 1927 when you met Sri Aurobindo for the first time. So now you must be 94." I was just 21 days past my 23rd year when I reached the Ashram. I met Sri Aurobindo for the first time on February 21, 1928. Since my arrival here I have kept my eyes strained towards the great goal Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have set up as the culmination of their Integral Yoga: the supramentalisation and divinisation of the body. But I have never forgotten that this goal has been put by them in a far-away future and that the central object has always been the realisation of the Divine - and now that our Gurus have left their bodies it is idle to think that any of us is going to do in a lifetime what they themselves didn't. This does not mean we cannot move towards it with whatever speed an illumined snail can command. Don't be shocked at my irreverence. Indeed it is vain to imagine we can move fast in that direction. But the best means towards it is the deepening and widening and heightening of the realisation of the Divine, especially with the psychic being as the ever-smiling centre of our manifold mystic movement. Adopting your language I would say that all else is unimportant, and I would add: "In spite of physical supramentalisation having been postponed, things are going fairly well here."
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In this connection the topic you have raised of X is pertinent. He is claiming to be supramentalising his body. Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have clearly said that the supramentabsation of the mind, the vital being and the physical consciousness have to precede the body's supramentalisation - and that there would be a failure in the Integral Yoga if the true soul has not emerged and taken charge of the sadhana with its constant spontaneous surrender to the Divine, its instinctive wide-spreading sweetness, its unfailing light of guiding truth, its poised intensity of tranquil strength. We have to look for signs of these spiritual states before we accept anybody's - yes, any body's - claim towards the ultimate supramentalisation.
Here is Sri Aurobindo writing to Sahana on 14.11.1933: "It is quite impossible for the Supramental to take up the body before there has been the full supramental change in the mind and the vital." And what has the Mother to say? "Before you take up the work of physical transformation, which is of all things the most difficult, you must have your consciousness firmly, solidly established in the Truth." (Bulletin, Vol. XV, No. 4, p. 52)
Besides, we have to remember what Sri Aurobindo has said from the beginning about the role of the Guru. I'll quote a few items:
"In this discipline the inspiration of the Master and, in the difficult stages, his control and his presence are indispensable - for it would be impossible otherwise to go through it without much stumbling and error which would prevent all chances of success. The Master is one who has risen to a higher consciousness and being and he is often regarded as its manifestation or representative. He not only helps by his Yogic teaching and still more by his influence and example but by a power to communicate his own experience to others." (Sri Aurobindo and His Ashram)
"Each man who enters the realms of yogic experience is free to follow his own way; but this yoga is not a path for anyone to follow, but only for those who accept and seek the
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aim, pursue the way pointed out upon which a sure guidance is indispensable. It is idle for anyone to expect that he can follow this road far - much less go to the end by his own inner strength and knowledge without the true aid or influence. Even the ordinary long-practised yogas are hard to follow without the aid of the guru; in this which as it advances goes through untrodden countries and unknown entangled regions, it is quite impossible." (Birth Centenary Edition Letters on Yoga, p. 1045)
"As for the letter, I suppose you will have to tell the writer that his father committed a mistake when he took up Yoga without a guru - for the mental idea of a Guru cannot take the place of the actual living influence. This Yoga especially, as I have written in my books, needs the help of the Guru and cannot be done without it." (Ibid., p. 1051)
Finally, there is Nirodbaran's Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Vol. 2, p. 900), which I have already quoted in Mother India some time ago:
"Is it only for physical transformation that staying here is necessary? Otherwise sincere sadhana can be done elsewhere as well as here."
"I don't suppose the later stages of the transformation including the physical would be possible elsewhere. In fact in those outside none of the three transformations - psychicisa-tion, spiritualisation, supramentalisation — seems to have begun. They are all preparing. Here there are at least a few who have started one or two of them. Only that does not show outside. The physical or external alone shows outside." (April 11, 1937)
Sri Aurobindo is talking of the Ashram. But surely no mere locality in Pondicherry is meant? What is meant is the place that has the physical presence of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This presence is the sine qua non for the divinisation or supramentalisation of the body. Without it the last stage of the Aurobindonian Yoga can be reached not by what 1 have termed in my letters to friends a concentrated and accelerated process - a spiritual revolution, as it were in the present
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lifetime - but only by a process of spiritual evolution through life after life. It is postponed and not cancelled, because the Supramental Light, Consciousness and Force manifested in the subtle-physical layer of the earth on February 29, 1956 and became secretly an active evolutionary factor in earth's history. With their manifestation the Mother has assured humanity's future supramentalisation beginning, of course, with a nucleus of "supermen". She was attempting also the spiritually revolutionary process - the supramental transformation of her own body, to be followed by the same change in her disciples provided they were thoroughgoing and psychically wide-open. This, for some reason of her own, did not work out. So we are left with the slow march of evolution. Even the pace of the spiritual revolution was never considered to be a super-swift one. The Mother has declared on Sri Aurobindo's authority that, after all the inner Yogic realisations had been compassed, it would take three hundred years for the physical transformation to be accomplished. Of course, the accomplishment would be preceded by the power to prolong one's life. And the accomplishment would be in the wake of the Gurus' own bodily supramentalisation, Sri Aurobindo wrote to me long ago that he was not working for physical supramentalisation for his own self alone and added: "But if it is not done in myself, it cannot be done in others." Of course he never put the Mother on a par with "others". When he left his body he told the Mother: "You have to fulfil our Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation." If it was not fulfilled in the Mother, it cannot be fulfilled in any of us.
In Nirodbaran's Correspondence (October 7, 1937, Vol. 2, p. 704), we also get a glimpse of two fundamental themes: (1) the central achievement in the supramental Yoga, (2) the ultimate result of it. Sri Aurobindo writes:
"What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness - conquest of death is something minor and, as 1 have always said, the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important - a thing to be added to complete the
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whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values - it would mean that the seeker was actuated, not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body - such a spirit could not bring the supramental change.
"Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing that could prevent it, so far as I can see, would be my own death or the Mother's."
You have not faced - nor have many of us here faced - all these truths. Hence your questions and the eagerness to meet X. You tell me that you tried to "ferret" him out when you were in the USA but failed. Now you are appealing to my supposed "sixth sense" to give you his "exact address". I am sorry I don't have this sense on tap - and even if I had I would not waste it on what you desire.
You have another question too: "Have you visited Auroville lately? Or are you still allergic to go to the wonder city of the future?" Well, in the early years after its foundation I went to Auroville a number of times. I gave a couple of talks to it and even spent a night there. I have had no general allergy - only a few aversions to particular aspects of it in the past.
(8.4.1992)
I have not come across any specific and detailed pronouncement by Sri Aurobindo or the Mother about the Resurrection of Jesus which the new Testament speaks of. But I have gathered from their writings or talks two points that can bear upon it. The kind of risen body which Christians claim for Jesus is not what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the transformed supramentalised body which they have as the ultimate goal for humanity. Sri Aurobindo has clearly said that a body which by its alleged divinity does not remain on the earth as a tangible lasting presence cannot answer to his view of the supramental physical. Once when the Mother's
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attention was drawn to the resurrected body attributed to Jesus, she exclaimed: "but this body went to heaven!"
The second point is that the supramental physical is the result of an evolutionary development of matter's own intrinsic dharma (or law) of "involved" Supemind: it is not the outcome of a miraculous superimposition from the Beyond by means of a siddhi (special power). The Beyond, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, descends into a mould prepared by the upward thrust of the concealed or covered within, which holds the same divinity as makes the down-thrust. The Integral Yoga in its fullness is meant to concentrate the evolutionary process into an accelerated revolutionary move-ment. It is not something achieved, as St. Paul says, "in the twinkling of an eye" during the hoped-for Second Coming of Christ at the world's end and taken up into the Beyond. A new gradually divinised life upon the earth and not a sudden transfiguration breaking with it and passing away from it: such is the Aurobindonian spiritual vision for the future.
(1988)
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29
My friend Mr. Baldoon Dhingra of UNESCO has sent me for comment a letter to him from you as Editors of the periodical MANAS of Los Angeles, touching upon Sri Aurobindo. I should like to clarify a few matters.
While saying you "are far from qualifying as 'experts' on Indian philosophy", you have submitted your "impression" that Sri Aurobindo has said nothing that is not better said in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Then you go on to make two points: (1) "Gandhi, on the other hand, it seems to us, gave a new vitality and contemporary life to India's ancient wisdom;" (2) "Gandhi, therefore, again it seems to us, was able to move other men in the direction of greatness - toward heroism, that is." Finally, you declare: "If Sri Aurobindo has anything of this sort to his credit, it has not come to our attention."
I should like to start with the point about Gandhi and the ancient wisdom of India. Let me ask: "What is meant by this wisdom?" The answer is in the two scriptures mentioned by you: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. There are various interpretations of these scriptures, but no interpretation can have any value if it denies that these scriptures put before us a life of God-realisation by means of direct concrete mystical experience of the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. This experience must be distinguished from the merely moral life. One can be a great mystic, a great Yogi, as well as a highly moral person. Indeed, morality in the highest sense goes hand in hand with mysticism and Yoga. But to be the practitioner of a moral life - however that may be conceived -does not necessarily make one a great mystic, a great Yogi. To be a knower of Brahman (the ultimate Reality), Atman (the Universal Self of selves, basically one with Brahman), Ishwara (the creative Personal God, the aspect of ultimate Reality which is in relationship with the persons that we are and with the universe He has emanated) - to be a knower of
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these supreme existences and to let that supra-intellectual knowledge issue in a life lived in the light of a more-than-human consciousness is something far greater than to be a mere moralist following ahimsa - non-violence - or any other rule by means of will-power and fellow-feeling. The moral life in itself is a fine thing, but it cannot be compared in greatness to the mystical life - the Life of a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ, a Teresa of Avila, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda, a Ramana Maharshi. Nor can we deny that nothing short of the mystical life, the Yogic spirituality, is the beau ideal of the Upanishads and the Gita, the vibrant luminous essence of India's ancient wisdom.
Now I may ask: "Whatever be Gandhi's greatness - and surely he was no small creature - can we regard him as a knower of Brahman, Atman, ishwara by direct concrete experience and reaksation such as the Upanishads and the Gita at their core urge upon us?" Nobody who has studied Gandhi's life will make the claim, nor did Gandhi himself think that he was a mystic or a Yogi. Mysticism and Yoga are never enjoined by him in any of his writings. All that he enjoins are truthfulness and non-violence. Valuable virtues, no doubt, but in themselves not at all identical with God-realisation such as India's ancient wisdom envisaged. You will perhaps say that Gandhi was not only a moral man but also a religious one. Granted. But surely you cannot put mere religion on a par with God-realisation. Religion at its best is a mental and emotional acceptance of the Eternal, the Infinite, the Divine. It can be a good preparation for the truly spiritual life, just as the practice of moral virtues can. But to be religious, no matter how highly, is not the same thing as to know the unitive life, the state of inner union with a more-than-human, a divine reality that brings a light, a bliss, a power, a love the merely mental and emotional acceptance of the Eternal and the Infinite can never compass. To talk of having faith in God or even of listening to an "inner voice" is to encourage and practise the ordinary religious temper and the ordinary moral conscience. A man of unusual calibre like
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Gandhi may encourage and practise these things in an unusual way, but they still remain, for all their intensification, within the domain of ordinary morality and religion and never cross the barrier between them and God-realisation.
Possibly at this point you will protest: "Don't you know that Gandhi was doing Karma Yoga, the Yoga of Work, and that the Indian scriptures speak ever so highly of the Karma Yogi?" Well, there is a lot of confusion caused by a loose employment of these scriptural terms. Popularly, Karma Yoga is supposed to be the doing of work with trust in God, a keen sense of duty and as much disinterestedness as possible. And the motive behind it is believed to be service of mankind. But one may inquire: "How does such action become Yoga?" Yoga means union - with the Divine; where is any room here for the unitive life?" What we have here is yet a mixture of religion and morality. The true Karma Yogi is a-fire with aspiration to unite with the Eternal and the Infinite. Service of mankind is only a means to an end for him: it is a means towards the mystical experience by enlarging one's scope of action beyond the small individual ego and, when the mystical experience is reached, service of mankind is a means to express that experience in the world. But this service is not the only means. Literature, art, science, educational activity, law, medicine, even humble private occupation, or anything else suiting one's abilities - all these and not social service alone are the legitimate means available. And true Karma Yoga is done fundamentally by a threefold process: (1) there is a deeply devoted inner offering of one's actions to the Supreme Lord - a constant remembrance and consecration; (2) there is an inner detachment not only from the fruit of one's actions but also from the actions themselves, an ever-increasing detachment until the infinite desireless impersonal peace of the Atman, the one World-Self that is an ever-silent witness or watcher, is attained and a spontaneous superhuman disinterestedness becomes possible; (3) there is, through this attainment and through complete surrender of one's nature-parts to the Lord, the
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Ishwara, the transmission of a divine dynamism, a superb World-Will from beyond the world, in all one's acti
If a man does not have this God-realisation, it is anomalous to speak of his giving "a new vitabty and contemporary life to India's ancient wisdom" - for he does not at all embody that wisdom at its purest and profoundest. This is not to refuse greatness to him, but it is not the greatness ancient India upheld as the top reach of the human soul. So the comparison between Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo cannot stand. Even if, as alleged, Sri Aurobindo "has said nothing that is not better said in the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita" he is still in the direct line of the ancient wisdom of India. If India has anything pre-eminently to give humanity at present, it would be this wisdom in a form suitable and applicable to modern needs, this wisdom with a new and contemporary vitality. But without this wisdom the greatness and heroism one may induce in others are certainly never what ancient India considered the highest achievement in life and what modern India in tune with its inmost being could charge with appropriate new values and offer as the highest achievement.
If you are after spreading India's ancient wisdom in a form vibrant with contemporary vitality, you may choose somebody else than Sri Aurobindo whom you may think better than he in the line of mystical experience and philosophy and all-round constructivism, but if you choose Gandhi you are off the track altogether and are hardly acting in consonance with your aim. Declare your aim to be Tolstoyan Christianity in a garb of Jain and Buddhist morality coloured with the nomenclature of Hindu piety, and you will be justified in referring so frequently to Gandhi. And you will be justified in extolling whatever greatness and heroism this way of thought and life may cause. But neither this way of thought and life nor such greatness and heroism are relevant to the aim you have actually declared. Please do not imagine 1 am trying to belittle Gandhi in your eyes or to pour
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cold water on the enthusiasm you have for pushing his precepts. You are welcome to your admiration and your work. But the second and third points submitted in your letter are, in my opinion, based on a misunderstanding of fundamental facts.
Once the misunderstanding is cleared, you will be more inclined to study what Sri Aurobindo has to say and what he has done. I have written a score of articles scattered over several periodicals to bring home in various ways the newness of Sri Aurobindo, the extension he has made of India's ancient wisdom and the completeness, the integrality, to which he has carried the spiritual life and made it the fount of a dynamism and creativity in the world. Others too have written on the same theme and I may refer you to the article entitled Towards a New World by "Synergist" in the series The World Crisis and India in the fortnightly I am editing, Mother India.1 The article appeared in the Special Number of August 15, 1949. August 15, by the way, is not only the day of India's Independence but also the birthday of Sri Aurobindo - a seeming coincidence which we may well take to be really symbolic of the representative character of one who was Bengal's and afterwards all India's acknowledged leader in the most formative years of the country's struggle for freedom from British rule and who is a distinguished poet and an admirable prose-writer on a variety of subjects - philosophical, cultural, literary, sociological, political - and who, above alt, is the Master of a Yoga which does not reject but embraces the whole field of life and seeks to transform it to the uttermost.
Apropos of India's struggle for freedom, I may remark that in those six years which Sri Aurobindo spent in political activity and during which he was three times charged with sedition and three times acquitted, there was a play of heroism in his revolutionary programmes not only on his own part but also by way of infusing selfless courage in a .
1. At the time this letter was written (1950) Mother India was a fortnightly. .
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host of his followers. He has himself spoken of the grave and dangerous work he had to do, work which exposed him even to losing his life along with those who had turned heroes under his inspiration. Many of his "boys" actually went to the gallows with smiling faces and the cry he had made India-wide of "Bande Mataram" - "I bow to You, O Mother" - with which Bankim Chandra Chatterji's famous patriotic song begins. Sri Aurobindo was never an armchair theorist, a doctrinaire politician. He was a dynamic figure who charted out in embryo most of the constructive policies Gandhi later developed. Where he differed from Gandhi was in the latter's making a fetish of ahimsd and on two or three crucial occasions spoiling by such a one-sided obsession the political mass-movement which he had brought about as a push towards Swaraj. Again, Sri Aurobindo could never hesitate to throw his full weight behind the effort of the Allies to check Hitler, never put any hindrance in their way as Gandhian politicians did when Cripps came with his enlightened proposals and the Cabinet Mission brought similar plans for full support by India to the Allied Cause and for a post-war declaration of India's complete freedom either within the British Commonwealth or outside it. With a living grip always on fundamental realities both of the spiritual life and of the common world within which his brand of dynamic spirituality was to function, Sri Aurobindo stands out as an example par excellence of what editors of a periodical like Manas whose aim is to provoke vitalising thought would be expected to put forward before their readers.
(21.1.1950)
You in Singapore are felt by me nearer than you in England not merely because the "-Lion's City" is geographically nearer than any English "burgh" (from the same root as the Sanskrit "pur" in the "pore" of your place) to Pondicherry (meaning "The New Town") but also and prinapally because the ambience of Sri Aurobindo seems more living where you
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function as the President of the Sri Aurobindo Society than where you are just a stray Aurobindonian, Of course, there is another vision possible of England. You have touched on it yourself by referring to No, 2, Plynlinimon Road in Hastings where Sri Aurobindo spent his sixteenth birthday with his brothers. I say "touched" because many more spots in England felt the impress of the bud-form of what traditional Indians continue to call the "lotus-feet" of the Avatar who was their Guru.
Perhaps the most sacred spot is the room at King's College, Cambridge, where young Aurobindo was unfolding his powers the most with superb proficiency in Greek and Latin side by side with mastery in English and where the founts of poetic inspiration were first unsealed to issue in lines like the opening of "Night by the Sea" in which in spite of a half-Romantic half-Victorian colour in the language we get a glimpse or rather a foreshadow of inner mysteries -
Love, a moment drop thy hands;
Night within my soul expands.
Veil thy beauties milk-rose fair
In that dark and showering hair.
Coral kisses ravish not
When the soul is tinged with thought;
Burning looks are then forbid.
Let each shyly parted lid
Hover like a settling dove
O'er those deep blue wells of love.
Outer mysteries making a vague counterpart to the inner secrecies, hover in the preluding speech of the dialogue named "Songs to Myrtilla". They are also likely to have beckoned to Aurobindo in his late teens during his stay in that Cambridge-room. His expression of them is surprisingly mature with a distinct originality in a genre that is part Wordsworth, part Shelley and part Keats:
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When earth is full of whispers, when
No daily voice is heard of men,
But higher audience brings
The footsteps of invisible things.
When o'er the glimmering tree-tops bowed
The night is leaning on a luminous cloud,
And always a melodious breeze
Sings secret in the weird and charmed trees.
Pleasant 'tis then heart-overawed to lie
Alone with that clear moonlight and that listening sky.
Along with the sheer loveliness of the imaged idea and emotion, there is the enchanting modulation of the metrical length of the lines, the way in which, as it were, "the footsteps of invisible things" fall variously in a changing pattern of four, three and five feet and culminate in a final run of six, subtly suggesting the spreading wideness overhead of a calm luminosity and of an intent silence. Here is technical skill at its best, spontaneously striking.
By the way, in the same dialogue between Glaucus and Aethon occurs, among several felicities sometimes extending to quite a number of lines in the midst of scattered passages somewhat immature and cloying, that simple-looking pentameter -
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks -
about whose "heart" and "art" 1 have written at some length in a letter published in Mother India. Here inerrant is the choice of "hurrying" for the water's movement in the context of "reluctant rocks" - a context where along with the r-alliteration picking up the internal r-sound of "hurrying" we have an appropriate retarding effect in the cluster of consonants in "reluctant".
King's College has indeed a lot of Sri Aurobindo impressed on its subtle ether akash, but possibly the central being in him, the one that became the Master Yogi of the age, can be
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best tuned-in to at 6 Burlington Road, London, where in 1892 the young Aurobindo, just turned 20, was not only oriented towards India's cause of freedom by joining the clandestine "Lotus and Dagger" Society but also had, through an "empathic" study of Indian spiritual philosophy in the pages of Max Muller, his first experience which may be situated on the threshold of Yoga, as it were: by an intense effort of mental concentration he had a distant imaginative sense of the Atman, the universal Self of selves.
I don't know whether, on return to India, he had any keen nostalgia for the country where he had spent 14 formative years. His early verse takes much pleasure in English flowers and landscapes and there is an unforgettable prolonged revelling in the memory of the English countryside in an essay by him on translating Kalidasa. Throughout his life English literature - English poetry in particular - was a living presence, and a speech in Baroda evinces an appreciative recollection of the temper of "liberal education" at the great English universities. But, according to his own declaration, he had more affinity with France, which he never visited, than with England where his material circumstances had been difficult and where, unlike his brother Manmohan, he had scarcely any warm friendships. But the lack of personal attachment would hardly have stood in the way of his understanding your present feelings about the natural scenery of the land of your birth. At least I, who only spent three months as a boy of 6 in the London of hansom-cabs and gas-lamps, have a tremendous attraction to your native country. It is as if life after life in the past I had spent there -or as if in any case my last birth before now had been in England and the sense of its physical features no less than of its language had persisted across the oblivion which succeeds each re-entry of the soul into earth-life. Were I to visit certain scenes in England I might repeat in myself something like Wordsworth's experience when he wrote those four lines which move me strangely:
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My eyes are filled with idle tears.
My heart is vainly stirred.
For the same sounds are in my ears
As in my youth I heard.
Your words - "the Welsh mountains, and the 'long roads full of rain' of the seaside town where I went to school" - remind me of that stanza which has haunted me for years:
From the lone shieling1 of our misty island
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
But still the blood is warm, the heart is highland
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
Perhaps mostly the spell is due to the last line which goes repeating the long e-sound and culminates this characteristic with a name which has been invested with a soulfully romantic magic after that passage in "The Solitary Reaper" of Wordsworth:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In springtime from the Cuckoo-bird
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Your recent experiences in England interest me a great deal. The appearance of Champaklal in your midst must have been indeed inspiring. How did his globe-trotting steps turn right towards your Kentish house? Your short but vivid account of Champaklal's play with the ancient sword sent my mind to an incident in Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse: the feat of bow-less and sling-less Colan the Gael, swifter than the arrow-flight attempted by Earl Harold from the opposite side:
Whirling the one sword round his head,
A great wheel in the sun,
1. Scottish word for grazing ground for cattle.
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He sent it splendid through the sky,
Flying before the shaft could fly -
It smote Earl Harold in the eye.
And blood began to run.
Marvelling at this feat,
... Said Alfred: "Who would see
Signs, must give all things. Verily
Man shall not taste of victory
Till he throws his sword away."
Then Alfred, prince of England,
And all the Christian earls,
Unhooked their swords and held them up,
Each offered to Colan, like a cup
Of chrysolite and pearls.
And the King said, "Do thou take my sword
Who have done this deed of fire.
For this is the manner of Christian men,
Whether of steel or priestly pen.
That they cast their hearts out of their ken
To get their hearts' desire.
Your sweet whisper to yourself, "Why can't Amal come?", got a good answer from yourself. But it is not only his "Collected Poems" that would remain unprepared for publication: his other 20 books or so, plus the 2 already in the press, will find it hard to be out. Amal also feels that in the time still left to him for the Aurobindonian yoga he can't afford to disperse his powers: he needs all of them to cast his heart out of his ken towards the depths of the intense Unseen and the heights of the immense Unknown.
(31.7.1988)
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I also felt a little sad that the line from Sri Aurobindo we have known in the form —
All can be done if the God-touch is there -
has been found to be in the original text with a small g which has to be restored when we publish the Critical or Revised Edition of Savitri. In my mind the wonderfully simple yet profound line with the capital G always belonged to the highly inspiring company of those other single-line masterpieces of Sri Aurobindo in a similar vein alluding to the ultimate Deity:
One who has shaped the world is still its lord....
His failure is not failure whom God leads....
How can his work be vain when God is guide?...
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all...
But let me console you (and myself) that all is not really lost with the small g. What Sri Aurobindo means is a psychological-spiritual generalisation, pointing not directly to the one supreme Divinity but to the Godlike derived from Him. The difference from the miscopied version which has been current is that God is spoken of in a broad instead of a specific connotation, and there is the conjuration of a secret potency in the depths of all human beings to bring up into activity a divine element which laughs at the difficult. and even the seeming impossible. This nuance I hint at in my expression: "psychological-spiritual." In the passage itself where the line occurs, the reference is to the advent of the Dawn, a preparation for the account of the approach of this superhuman Presence which would break the bonds of darkness - Dawn that is called "the godhead" in the line:
An instant's visitor the godhead shone.
A little later she is given the name: "The omniscient Goddess". And not too further on we have in the original
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text a line which too has become a part of our quotation-stock with a mistaken capital:
Only a little the god-light can stay. .
In between we have "the fields of God" and "the reclining body of a god". From this blend of the upper and lower cases in the same extended context I conclude that Sri Aurobindo does not draw any sharp line of significance between them but distinguishes fine shades of the Divine's presence or power according to his sense of the appropriate in each place.
In one sense the small g should buck us up. In facing obstacles we have now a twofold source of sustenance. There is the Supreme outside of us to whom we can raise our cry and there is also the Supreme inside of us whom we can call up. Though both are essentially the same, now the pointer is more directly to the latter than to the former and the hope, nay, the promise, is given us that by the evocation of the divinity within, who is an image of the divinity without - by the feeling and perception of the two as simultaneously existent for us - we have the gift of a strength capable of overcoming hurdles of the most formidable nature if only we realise unegoistically the Grace that has come with this gift.
(7.7.1986)
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