A Century’s Salutation to

Sri Aurobindo

 

THE GREATNESS OF THE GREAT

 

I

 

THE greatness of a person is the greatness of the Impersonal in him. He has little concern about himself. His thoughts, feelings and acts are in relation to a wider frame of reference. The wider the frame, the higher the status of the being; there is an ascending scale in the structure of human life and society. There are gradations that mount from narrower ranges, moving towards vaster and vaster ranges, taking the person into greater and purer degrees of impersonality. We start, for example, from the lowest and narrowest range, namely, the family, and extend ourselves more and more to the next range, the nation, then to mankind and then still farther to transcendent ranges.

    Sri Aurobindo from his very birth was such an impersonal personality–and, in the very highest sense. He had never the consciousness of a particular individual person: all reference to a personal frame of his was deleted from the texture of his nature and character. There was some reference to the family frame in a very moderate way, almost casually: the stress was much more on the next higher frame, the national. In its time the national frame was very strong and played a great part; and yet even there it was not an end in itself, the frame of humanity always loomed large behind. In fact it was that that gave a greater and truer value and significance to the national frame. The national is but a ladder to humanity, it is a unit in the human collectivity. It serves as a channel for

 

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international and global welfare, but there is yet a still larger frame, the frame of the spirit, the transcendent consciousness. Indeed it was this that lay at the bottom of Sri Aurobindo's consciousness as the bedrock of his being which gave the whole tone and temper of his life, its meaning and purpose. Even when not overt and patent this noumenal personality was always there insistent from behind; it gave a peculiar rhythm and stress, newness and freshness and a profound element of purposefulness to the whole life, even to the activities of the earlier and narrower frames. For it was like viewing everything through the eyes of infinity and eternity, the eye wide extended in heaven as the Vedic Rishi says, the third eye.

      In other words, the yogi, the Divine, the Impersonal man in Sri Aurobindo was the real person always there from the very birth. Thus we see him starting life exactly with the thing where every one ends. In his inner being he had not to pass through the gradations that lead an ordinary person gradually towards the widening ranges of consciousness and existence. In all the stations of his life, in every sphere and status Sri Aurobindo was doing his duties, that is, his work – kartavyam karma – selflessly, which means with no sense of self, or perhaps we should say, with supreme Selfhoodness; for such is the character, the very nature of the born yogi, the Godman. The duties done for and within a frame of life tend always to overflow, as it were, the boundaries and do not always strictly follow the norm of the limited frame. For example, even while in the family life, in the midst of relatives and close friends he was never moved by mere attachment or worldly ties, he was impelled to do what he had to in the circumstances, unattached, free, under another command. Again, when he chose the larger field of national life, here too, he was not limited to that frame, his patriotism was not chauvinism or a return to the parochialism of the past; his patriotism was broad-based upon the sense of human solidarity and even the broad-based humanity was not broad enough for the consciousness in him; for humanity does not mean mere humanitarianism, charity, benevolence, or service to mankind. True humanity can be or is to be reached by pushing it still farther into the Divinity where men are not merely brothers or even portions of the Divine but one with Him, the self-same being and personality.

 

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    Thus, Sri Aurobindo was an ideal worker, the perfect workman doing the work appropriate to the field of work according to its norm, faultless in execution. As a family man, as a citizen, as a patriot, he carried out his appointed function not in any personal sense with the feeling or consciousness of any individual personality but a large impersonal personality free from ego-sense which is the hallmark of a luminous cosmic consciousness, based upon a still higher and transcendent standing.

    Sri Aurobindo was a man of action absolutely in the Gita's sense of the word. He set an example, he was an exemplar showing by his life his way of "standing and walking" as the Gita puts it – the actions that should be done and the way of doing according to the stage and the field given to oneself. This does not naturally mean that one has to be bound to the current frame, bound to the conventional, attached to what is customary, transitional and formal; on the contrary as I have said, Sri Aurobindo in his stride was always transgressing and overflowing the borders, he was a revolutionary, even an iconoclast, for nothing short of the supreme and complete and integral truth satisfied the urge of consciousness in him; in this sense each step of the scale served as a jumping board to the higher, indeed to the highest inherent or hidden in every one of them.

   It was this secret ultimate truth that overshadowed, brooded over all these stages and steps and occupations he passed through: they only led up to that transcendent reality, but it was the sense, constant sense of that reality that lent a special character to all his karma. This. urge towards the supreme reality, this transcendence, did not mean for him a rejection of the domains passed through: it is a subsuming, that is to say, uplifting the narrower, the lower status, integrating them into the higher: even as the soil at the root of the plant is subsumed and transmuted into the living sap that mounts high up the plant towards its very top, to the light and energy above.

   In the scheme and pattern of human existence in the hierarchy that is collective life, Sri Aurobindo sought to express the play of the supreme Truth, express materially that which works always in secret and behind the veil. The Supreme Reality is not merely the supreme awareness and consciousness, but it is a power and a force; and it holds still a secret source that has

 

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not yet been touched, – touched consciously by the human consciousness and utilised for world existence. Man's genius has contacted today in the material world material forces which are almost immaterial – the extra-galactic radiation, the laser beams and other energies of that category which are powerful in an unbelievable unheard of 'degree. Even so in the consciousness, there is a mode of force which is not only a force that knows but creates, not only creates but transforms. That force at its intrinsic optimum can enter into dull matter and transforming it, transform into radiant matter, radiant not only with the physical, the solar light but the light of the supreme Spirit.

    This is the force which Sri Aurobindo has disclosed and put at the disposal of mankind. This is the force he has set free that is creating a new world,–reorganising and remoulding, through a great travail indeed, our ancient sphere that will cradle the earth of the golden age.

 

II 

 

   In Sri Aurobindo particularly the impersonalisation is in reality a re-personalisation. Impersonalisation need not mean de-personalisation, that is to say, a complete negation and annihilation of all personality: impersonalisation really means the negation of the ego or rather the replacement of the ego by the true person, the ego being only a deformation or degradation. The basic ego-sense lies in the individual; but it has its formations in the collectivity also at all the different degrees and levels of consciousness. We have spoken of the mounting frames of reference, and accordingly there is a family ego, a national ego and even there is a humanity ego. The collective ego is as strong as the individual ego. It is only in the transcendent consciousness, the consciousness of the Divine who is the one true Person, that the inferior egos are eliminated or sublimated and can find their true person.

    Thus the true process of impersonalisation is re-personalisation; in other words, to be conscious of, to grow into and become the true reality of the being behind the ego formation. I t means divinisation of the person. The individual divinises

 

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 himself into the individual Divine and then around him, first of all, in his inner consciousness, the frame or field changes also into a divine structure. Thus even the family for such a consciousness changes not only its connotation but even its denotation. We may in this connection remember Christ's words with regard to his true family. The nation too assumes its Divine reality, a transcendent personality appears as an expression of the Divine afflatus, each one a particular mode of fulfilling the cosmic purpose. Humanity too undergoes a sea-change and its personality attains a glorious stature in the sahasra-shirsha Purusha as hymned by the Vedic Rishi.

       This is the cosmos that Sri Aurobindo has expressed, created in his consciousness and therefore in the consciousness of the cosmos itself. This transcendent formation the future is holding ready-made in the womb of the World-Purusha (or rather World-Prakriti) and the day is approaching when this new creation will manifest itself upon earth. The true truth of things is always there up somewhere in the Supreme – in the Parabrahman – from time sempiternal: the question is when and how to bring it down. He who does that is the Avatara, he who comes down and embodies it.

   To recapitulate: Impersonalisation involves or culminates in divinisation which means the descent of the Divine, the supreme Person, from above or His emergence from within (both mean the same thing), with the result that all other inferior or external formulations are subsumed, integrated into the supreme Reality forming one single body and personality.

    Such is the content of Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness, such is the work that is being pursued under the stress of that consciousness towards the realisation of a new, a divine world.

    We end as we began, only giving a positive turn to what we said: the greatness of the Great is the greatness of the Divine in him.

    In conclusion, here is, in his own words, what he stood for and worked for, what he promises for the future of earth and mankind:

 

       All then shall change, a magic order come

       Overtopping this mechanical universe.

      A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal’s world.

 

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       On Nature's luminous tops, on the Spirit’s ground,

       The superman shall reign as king of life,

       Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven

      And lead towards God and truth man’s ignorant heart

      And lift towards godhead his mortality.

        

      Nature shall live to manifest secret God,

      The Spirit shall take up the human play,

      This earthly life become the life divine.¹

 

1 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book II, Canto 1, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 706-7.

 

I PROPOSE to speak to you on a very interesting subject – about Sri Aurobindo. You know it is his centenary, that is to say, this August¹ he completes a hundred years of earthly existence: I say earthly advisedly because although he has left his body he has not left earth's atmosphere. The Mother assures us he will be there to see the work begun be completed. I will speak on a very peculiar aspect of Sri Aurobindo's life. Many must have noticed it but I wish to draw your particular attention to it. Sri Aurobindo's life is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is not that of an ordinary human being. The life of an ordinary man follows a well-marked line of development, almost a routine good for everybody. The pattern is familiar, you can even foresee and foretell the future – and the destiny of a person. You start as a student, join a school, go up to the college, after passing out you choose a profession, become an engineer or doctor or businessman or something well-recognised like that, then you continue to stick to the job you have chosen: you become a rich man or if you are unfortunate a poor man, anyhow go through the experiences of the life allotted to you, you become old, have children, grandchildren and then pass away; that is the ordinary course of life. In Sri Aurobindo life has a different line, movement and procedure. Strangely it consists of breaks, sudden unforeseen turns almost cutting away the past altogether. And then what is to be noted is that these breaks or turns are not imposed upon him but they are normally his own conscious decisions out of his own deliberate will, except one or two, I shall point out as I go on. These turns.

 

 ¹15 August 1972

 

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however may not be always a right-about-turn but anyhow, I may say, a right turn, a turn to the right, always to the right – until the final ultimate Right is reached.

First of all – let us begin from the very beginning. The very first step or turn he took in his early childhood was in fact a complete about turn – the antipodes of what he was and where he was. For, he was almost uprooted from his normal surroundings and removed across far seas to a distant land. From out of an Indian Bengali family he was thrown into the midst of a British Christian family. He was made to forget his native language, his country's traditions, his people's customs and manners, he had to adopt an altogether different mode of life and thinking, a thoroughly Europeanised style and manner. Naturally being a baby this was an occasion, the earliest when he had not his choice, his own deliberate decision but had to follow the choice of his father – the choice perhaps of his secret soul and destiny. His father meant well, for he wanted his children to be not only good but great according to his conception of goodness and greatness. Now, in that epoch when the British were the masters of India and we their slaves, in those days the ideal for a person of intelligence and promise, the ideal of success was to become a high government official, a district magistrate or a district judge; that was the highest ambition of an Indian of that time and naturally Sri Aurobindo's parents and well-wishers thought of Sri Aurobindo in that line, he would become a very famous district magistrate or a Commissioner even, the highest position that an Indian could achieve. So he had to appear at an examination for that purpose, it was called – those glittering letters to Indian eyes: I.C.S. (Indian Civil Service). Now here was the very first deliberate choice of his own, the first radical turn he took – to cut himself away from the normally developing past. He turned away from that line of growth and his life moved on to a different scale. His parents and friends were mortified such a brilliant boy come to nought but he had pushed away the past as another vision allured him and he stuck to his decision.

Next as you all know, he came to Baroda, entered the State service – as Secretary to the Maharaja and professor of the College. That life was also externally a very normal and ordinary life – an obscure life, so to say, but he preferred obscurity

 

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for the sake of his inner development and growth. Still he continued in that obscure position that was practically what we call the life of a clerk. He continued it for sometime, although sometime meant twelve years, the same length as his previous stage. Then a moment came when he changed all that. Another volte-face. If he continued he might have advanced, progressed in his career, that is to say, become Principal of the College, even the Dewan of Baroda, a very lofty position, a very lofty position indeed for an Indian, become another R. C. Dutt. But he threw all that overboard, wiped off the twelve years of his youthful life and came to Bengal as a national leader, a leader of the new movement that wanted freedom for India, freedom from the domination of Britain. He jumped into this dangerous life – the uncertain life of a servant of the country, practically without a home, without resources of his own. He ran the risk of being caught by the British, put into prison or shot or hanged even but he chose that life. That was a great decision he took, a turn about entirely changing the whole mode of his life. Eventually as a natural and inevitable result of his political .activities he was arrested by the British and put into prison. He had to pass a whole year in the prison. And this led to another break from the past, ushering in quite another way of life. The course of his life turned inward and moved from depth to depth.

In the prison one incident happened which is not known to many but extremely important and of great consequence. I have mentioned it in my Reminiscences.¹ When we were in prison we thought – we were the first batch of political prisoners accused of conspiracy and practically of rebellion against the established government – so we thought this was the end of our life's journey. One day we will be taken out and shot: court trial and justice was a make-believe and sham. Or if we were lucky enough we would be exiled to the Andamans – the notorious kalapani. So a few of our leaders in the prison who were elders to us thought of escape from the prison-make a dash, break out, scale the walls, out in the open. There were plannings with outside helpers. When the plan was a little matured, our elders thought of consulting Sri Aurobindo. Without his Consent naturally nothing could be done. For he was the one

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.

 

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leader and guide. So when Sri Aurobindo was informed of the plan he said bluntly: I am not going to do anything of the kind. I stand the trial. As a natural consequence the project fell through and very fortunately for us. It is true he already knew the result of the case, that is that he would be freed and nothing would happen to him. Still at that time there was a suspense and we all were in doubt. This decision of Sri Aurobindo was another, I may say, great turn of his life. If he had accepted the prospect his life and destiny would have been different, we all would have been massacred. In other words he saved his life for his spiritual work.

On coming out he engaged himself again in the national work, the British were truly perturbed and worried because they knew here was the man, the source of all mischief. They did not know how to control and get at him. So they thought of arresting him again and deport him, send him out of bounds – outside India, to Burma or some such far off place. In the meanwhile he continued to do his work as usual, editing two papers, seeing and advising people, going out on lecturing tours etc. But it was time for the next break or turn. One day-one night, that is to say – all of a sudden he said, he would go to an unknown destination and literally he did so, dropped and left things as they were and disappeared. People knew later on that he had gone to Pondicherry. This time it was almost literally wiping out the past. He started an altogether new life, inner and outer. Here started directly his climb to the Supramental. Here too after a few years came an occasion when he had to take another radical decision. One more turn to the right – to the more, yet more right.

The British could not tolerate his existence, his safe existence in India, even though in (the then) French India. They felt themselves unsafe, for they felt this man could do anything. As France was an ally to the British, there was an entente cordiale, so they both came to an understanding and made a proposal to Sri Aurobindo: France would gladly receive Sri Aurobindo in their midst, give him safe shelter and quiet circumstances to pursue his spiritual life. France was ready to offer Sri Aurobindo a house, a home in Algeria. Here too Sri Aurobindo answered with a clear and definite No. He said he would stick to the place he had chosen. Sri Aurobindo had some friends and companions

 

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who also took shelter in the French territory. They would have liked to accept the proposal to escape from the constant British persecution. But Sri Aurobindo's decision came as a disappointment to them, but they had to acquiesce. Now, at this distance of time we can see all the import of his formidable decision half a century ago.

There was yet one more crisis, a great crisis – the fate of humanity and also his own destiny, the fate of his work depended upon it. The world was nearing the world-shaking war – the Second World War. It was the invasion of the asuric forces upon earth to destroy humanity and human civilisation and prevent the advent of that truth which Sri Aurobindo was preparing to bring down. Sri Aurobindo opposed that mighty onrush with his will and divine strength. He broke the hostile downward-speeding force by taking it into himself, even like god Shiva who swallowed poison and harboured it in his throat to release immortality for the Gods. The subtle attack left in him a bruised body and to man a saved world. He followed up his action by a whole-hearted support to the Allies in that war against those who were the instruments of the Hostiles.

We come finally now to the last act, the last decision that he took of an almost complete turn, a full cycle. It was his considerate deliberate decision to move out of the physical material scene and take his station just in the background from where he could move and direct things more effectively.

I have spoken of Sri Aurobindo's life as a series of radical turns that changed the movement, the mode of life, almost radically every time the turn came. The turn meant a break with the past and a moving into the future. We have a word for this phenomenon of radical and unforeseen change. You know the word, it is intervention. Intervention means, as the Mother has explained to us more than once, the entry of a higher, a greater force from another world into the already existent world. Into the familiar established mode of existence that runs on the routine of some definite rules and regulations, the Law of the present, there drops all on a sudden another mode of being and consciousness and force, a Higher Law which obliterates or changes out of recognition the familiar

mode of living; it is thus that one rises from level to level, moves out into wider ranges of being, otherwise one stands still,

 

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remains for ever what he is, stagnant, like an unchanging clod or at the most a repetitive animal.

The higher the destiny, the higher also the source of intervention, that is to say, more radical – more destructive yet more creative – destructive of the past, creative of the future.

I have spoken of the passing away of Sri Aurobindo as a phenomenon of intervention, a great decisive event in view of the work to be done. Even so we may say that his birth too was an act of intervention, a deliberate divine intervention. The world needed it, the time was ripe and the intervention happened and that was his birth as an embodied human being – to which we offer our salutation and obeisance today.

The century salutes a divine birth and a death divine, ushering in a century of diviner moment.

 

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Divine Manifestation

 

I

 

IT IS Integration. I am using a much used, much abused word but it happens to be the word. We have reached a status of consciousness within as distinct units, individual or collective: our effort should now be to co-ordinate, to harmonise the different and differing units or separate elements into a well-knit single whole. That means, the ego-centres that are still left and active are to be exorcised, purified – the separative knot has to be dissolved and the true centre of unity to be found – the psychic divine centre.

First each element in the individual, each level of his being must find its centre, its soul or psychic base – and then only a co-ordination of all would be possible. Next through the psychic level the general level of the being and consciousness, that is to say, its expression and its field of action should be lifted and raised to a higher potency of poise – the higher the better – towards the higher mind, towards the overmental – and beyond.

The Divine Presence in the heart – the central psychic – should not only be felt constantly there in the heart but in all other parts or levels of the being: it must create or awake its figure or norm everywhere so that it can inspire and control directly all activities and movements in a global and total gesture. It has to be an integral dynamic Presence, that is the way of uplifting the poise of the adhara, its global existence. The process is first to deepen the Presence, that is from the surface to dive into the inner realm and then float up again into a wider and higher expanse, deeper and deeper means truer and

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truer truth – nearer the pure fundamental reality – the Eternal and Infinite, the supreme Spirit, the bedrock of existence. Higher and higher means formulations of the Reality in a gradually evolving expansion up the ladders of the physical, the vital, the mental consciousness and towards the higher mental and overmental, indeed towards the Supramental.

 

II

 

It is not sufficient that the central psychic being comes forward and exercises what is at most a general influence on the other limbs of the being. It should enter into its counter-parts or counter-points – the inherent psychic centres of each part and parcel and make them directly active. The central psychic – self – has its delegated selves everywhere in the global being. Indeed each particle of the being must itself be a psychic or psychicised particle: a consciousness-photon. There is thus a vital photon, a mental photon, a photon of the physical consciousness even as the material photon. And all these in their hierarchic harmonious arrangement shall constitute the global system of the new person.

Even so, there is to be a transmutation of the environment also: the outer objects and circumstances and happenings will be a field – an Einsteinian field – of modulations, pulsations, tensions, of these consciousness-particles of the psychic.

An uplift of consciousness is a natural consequence of the psychic's aspiration. The psychic has the power to call down the rain of higher existence, a wider law of being-higher means, as I have said, higher than the highest mental yet achieved by man normally and generally-stepping by the intermediary gradations towards the Supermind.

This, on the whole, is the inherent activity of the inferior or subordinate nature in its aspiration to move upward and transform itself. This activity in us all, it must be noted, is supported, initiated and inspired by the self-action of the higher nature, the descent of the above-mental regions.

 

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III

 

The first definitive and distinctive higher status is that of the Overmind. Its character is a global and entire being and consciousness, a cosmic and universal all-inclusive existence. Each being attains its self and each self lives in every other self and all selves together and at the same time live in each self. The diversities are not abolished – as in the unitary consciousness and being of the absolute Existence, Brahman – variations  are maintained as the multiple aspects or modalities of the same single infinite eternal power.

 I am now speaking here of samrajya-siddhi, the realisation of the world-empire, the spiritual or Divine Empire. First of course there is, as the basis of the samrajya, the svarajya, the kingdom or reign of the individual's own self. In effect, the world-empire or the imperial reign of the Spirit has three gradations. At the outset each element, that is, each individual human being (we limit ourselves to the human collectivity at present) has to attain svarajya, self-rule, a perfectly homogeneous integral spiritual whole in himself: then all such individuals should achieve integrality with one another. Each lives in and through every other and all together live in everyone. The whole forms an indissoluble integral and unitary life. This collective integration means all individuals have one mind, one vital being, even one physical consciousness, not of course one material body but still a feeling of the' kind. One mind or one vital or one physical consciousness does not mean everyone has the same identical formations and movements in these respective regions, but all possess substantially the same stuff belonging to a self-same unit. A comparison or analogy may explain and illustrate the point. For example, the different parts of a human body form one integrated texture: they are all bound up, united although not fused together, in an inextricable, "inexorable" unity. Action in one part creates a reaction, re-echoes or re-doubles in every other part: they all rise up like one man as it is popularly said, at a single touch. Different in form, different in function, they are identical in their substantial composition, in their fundamental stuff-the organic plasma; even so, the minds of all, their vital movements, their physical movements too, however different and diverse, contrary or

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contradictory, are in their own respective domains part and particles of the one and the same substance and all together contribute to form, to create a symphony, a grand Beethovenesque orchestra.

The next grade of integration in the Divine world-empire comes when not only individuals but groups and collectivities find and establish their own selves – each its svarajya, and all combined in a yet larger and greater organisation: combined and unified they act in a unified and homogeneous living as individuals do in the world aggregate. Although the individual is the basic reality, aggregations and collectivities also are realities, even spiritual realities in the progressive unfoldment of the cosmic spirit.

 

IV

 

Such a consummation, so complex in composition, so global in scope would be possible only when the above-mental or the overmental world-consciousness descends into the mental and lower hemisphere and takes possession of it and becomes active and dynamic there. The movement upward, the evolutionary force in nature inclusive of the human aspiration is the spearhead to break through the solid frontier wall of ignorance and inferior consciousness; the luminous point that breaks through is, as I have said, the soul-power, the psychic. That creates the rift in the dense covering through which can pour down the rains and streams of the universal consciousness with its purificatory ablution of the lower nature and conciousness. But this again becomes not only possible but inevitable when this new consciousness contacts openly and directly its master and overlord, the supreme Supramental Consciousness, which is the true reality pressing down always upon the lower creation, rejecting whatever has to be thrown out, sifting and screening the mixture, sublimating, subsuming all that has to be retained within itself.

The problem, the fundamental problem is not merely to extract the Truth out of its covering of falsehood-in the image of the Upanishads, to pull the inner stem out of its sheath. It is not sufficient to liberate the spirit from the obscuring matter

 

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but to instal the spirit in the body of matter and transfigure it into the substance of the Spirit, build it in its own image. It is not sufficient to arrive at the One without the second, the Unitary Unit, but to realise the Unit in its most concrete multiplicity.

  To spiritualise Matter does not mean dematerialising Matter! It means rather re-materialising the Spirit. And that is the task of the Supermind and its intermediate and immediate helpers – agents and emissaries – the Overmind and Above-mind.

 

V

 

  The Supermind is of Course the last and ultimate or other wise the first and original Support and inspiration of all other levels of being and living. Apart from this fundamental, this one source of sustenance, each intermediary level depends directly and leans upon the one that lies just above it, over arches it as it were. Thus speaking of the major intermediaries, the Overmind is under the direct control and guidance of the over-arching Supermind. And Overmind itself over-arches, broods over the mind and from behind guides and controls it. The Mind has evolved primarily because of the pressure of the Overmind standing immediately above it in the hierarchy of the grades of existence. And because of this constant ruling presence of the Overmind, the mind in man is a progressive entity unveiling powers lent or delegated to it, sent down into it from the Overmind. The animal, on the contrary, is not a progressive being like man, for the Overmind does not reach it. The animal is not in contact with the Overmind. It is in contact, a somewhat precarious contact, with the Mind. Something of the Mental has made an inroad into him, into his vital texture. It is to be noted that the mind in the animal is of a different kind from the human mind: it is only in the domesticated animals, the animals living in the neighbourhood of man, having contact with him, that something of the human mind percolates Or is imbibed. As I have said, the human mind has developed and is developing fast, specially in recent years, to an extraordinary degree, in the domain of physical science leading to discoveries that appear so subtle and distant, far off

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as almost to be out of reach of his normal means of experience. Discoveries of other kinds, hints and intimations with regard to other forms and fields of knowledge and experience are explained most logically and adequately by the fact of an interruption or intervention of another type of consciousness into the present constitution of the human mind. We are referring to the influence of the Overmind, gradually becoming more and more explicit, extensive and effective, the immediately directing power, the guide of the new age. And this naturally because of the operative presence, in and through the Overmind, of the Supramental upon earth and in earth.

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I

SUPERMIND is not a function, an extended function of the mind as someone seems to have presumed. Is Life then a function, an extended function of Matter? Is Mind also in its turn" a function, an extended function of Life? With equal reason one might conclude that God is an extended function of man and even Heaven an extended function of Earth!

A Sanskrit wit in trying to portray a pig for the benefit of one who has never seen the animal said (in joke or in earnest, one does not know): a pig is an elephant reduced or a mouse enlarged; it would be equally cogent or correct to say that the mind is the Supermind in reduced proportions or that the Supermind is the mind in enlarged proportions. One may "also remember in this connection Aesop's story of the boasting frog who wanted to inflate or blow himself into the size of a bull and blew himself up and burst into fragments in the attempt. The fate of the mind is likely to be the same if it attempted to magnify itself to the measure of Supermind.

However far the mind may be stretched, it cannot reach the Supermind. It is not a question of degree, but of kind, norm and quality. Even so, Matter, however subtilised, de-mate­rialised remains Matter – pulverized into infinitesimal particles at the farthest limits of the material universe it, does not abandon its material nature, it does not become Life. So again with regard to Life: Life-force, however extended or subtilised, does not acquire the mental power and become Mind. Matter evinces Life-power only when life is injected into it, Life exits somewhere else, exists by itself. In the same way Life betrays mental power when Mind is injected into it, mind is by

 

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---

itself something else. The difference, we may say, using a philosophical jargon, is not merely epistemological but ontological. These categories are, in fact, not derivative phenomena but self-existing Reals (noumena). Perhaps the word 'Supermind' itself is somewhat responsible for a misconstruction and mis­understanding. Supermind does not mean a "superior mind", it means beyond mind, away from mind, unreachable for mind – aprāpya manasā saha.

Supermind is not a function: It is a reality, the reality itself, the fundamental substance that underlies the world and its formulations of Mind, Life and Matter. It is that secret Energy of Consciousness and Being that lies as the seed and sprouts up and gradually expresses itself in its variant poises of mount­ing potency. These poises are not mere functions: a function is just the expression or operation of an already acquired or established power. It is a deducible conclusion from known and given data, the data and the conclusion are of the same basic nature, that is commensurable entities. Life and Matter are however not commensurable entities nor, Mind and Life. Even so the Supermind and Mind do not belong to the same category of objective reality. If that was so, one could very justifiably and in high seriousness proclaim in Sri Aurobindo's words − those radiant lines, bursting, as it were, with a sup­pressed laughter:

 

A DREAM OF SURREAL SCIENCE

­

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

    At the Mermaid, capture immortality;

A committee of hormones on the Aegean's brink

    Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

 

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

    Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light

And, rising from its mighty solitude,

    Spoke of the Wheel and eightfold Path all right.

 

A brain by a disordered stomach driven

    Thundered through Europe, conquered, ruled and fell,

From St. Helena went, perhaps, to Heaven.

    Thus wagged on the surreal world, until

Page 24

as the Vedic Rishi says ― you look from above down. Things take a different shape and value. The world is constructed in another way.

However, the Transcendent is also here within you. But to reach there too, the procedure is the same ― to jump over and stand on your head. How to do? Something of that acrobatics is taught by what is called in India ―Yoga.

Page 25

 

THE PASSING OF SATYAVAN

 

This was the day when Satyavan must die.

 

THE day is come, the fateful day, the last day of the twelve happy months that they have passed together. She knew it, it was foretold, it was foreseen. And she was preparing herself for it all the while, harbouring a pain deep-seated within the heart, revealed to none, not even to her mother, not even to Satyavan. Satyavan was innocent like a child, oblivious of the fate that was coming upon him. The two went out of the hermitage into the forest; for she wished to move about in the company of Satyavan in the midst of the happy greeneries where Satyavan had passed his boyhood, his youth. She was watching Satyavan at every step, she did not want to be caught unawares:

 

Love in her bosom hurt with jagged edges

Of anguish moaned at every step with pain

Crying, "Now, now perhaps his voice will cease

For ever". . .¹

She was on tip-toe as it were, almost breathless, the end must be coming on fast.      

Her life was now in seconds, not in hours,

And every moment she economised...²

 

    ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book VIII, Canto 3, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary

Library, Vol. 29, p. 563.

     ² Ibid.

Page 26

Satyavan in playfulness was cutting the branch of a tree with a joyous axe and on. his lips:

 

. . . high snatches of a sage's chant

That pealed of conquered death and demons slain, ¹

 

All of a sudden the doom came upon him, he felt a biting pain through his body and an invading suffocation besieged him. He threw away the axe and cried out to Savitri:

 

                                                                     "Savitri, a pang

Cleaves through my head and breast. . .

Such agony rends me. . . .

Awhile let me lay my head upon thy lap. . ."²

 

Savitri saw the end coming and she was ready:

 

All grief and fear were dead within her now

And a great calm had fallen.³

 

His life was ebbing away and

 

He cried out in a clinging last despair,

"Savitri, Savitri, 0 Savitri,

Lean down, my soul, and kiss me while I die".

              

His cheek pressed down her golden arm. She sought

His mouth still with her living mouth, as if

She could persuade his soul back with her kiss;

Then grew aware they were no more alone.

Something had come there conscious, vast and dire.

Near her she felt a silent shade immense. . . . .

 

 

Death is come claiming his prey, Satyavan must go and leave Savitri.

 

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book VIII, Canto 3, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary

Library, Vol. 29, p. 563.

² Ibid., p. 564

³ lbid., p. 564.

4 Ibid., p. 565.

Page 27

II

 

THE INTER-ZONE

 

Death is carrying away Satyavan, the luminous soul of Satyavan. The Great Shadow is leading the way, Satyavan following and Savitri clinging to his steps. Death saw Savitri pursuing, he turned and tried to dissuade her from the pursuit. Savitri refused to turn back. Death warned her, it was already a wrong and anomalous act that she has done to have crossed over to his sphere in her earthly personal being. It is time now to go back. Savitri answered that she would go back only with Satyavan in his earthly body. Death became impatient and answered: "You ask for the impossible. You want to go back to earth for earthly happiness. You can have that in plenty without Satyavan. Satyavan has passed beyond and there is no return for him." But Savitri was firm in her resolution:

   "I claim back Satyavan as he was, my happiness is with him alone."

As they proceeded, they mounted higher and higher regions of being. And a change was coming on visibly on Savitri. Death was explaining to her that happiness on earth or in earthly life is not the supremely desirable thing. The supreme desirable thing is to discard the maya of earthly life, that vale of tears and rise into the very source, the origin of creation, the infinite peace and silence. As Death was receding towards that ultimate Nothingness, the Divinity that Savitri was, the mighty Godhead that took a human shape, manifested itself more and more shedding all around her a great effulgence, a mighty power. She had entered into Death's own lair and identified herself with Death's self which is the Divine Himself. In that great burning Light Death was consumed and dissolved.

The dire universal shadow disappeared

Vanishing into the Void from which it came.

            

And Satyavan and Savitri were alone.¹

 They stand face to face with the supreme Divine alone.

 

¹

Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book X, Canto 4, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 668.

 

Page 28

There is yet a last choice to make. Death has been annihilated and immortality attained. One can rest there and enjoy immortality eternally beyond the mortal creation. But there is a greater destiny for the human soul. Ignorance is darkness indeed but to enter into Light alone is to enter into a greater darkness. And Savitri has attained the immortality as a human being, as human personality. She is to bring down that im­mortality into the human creature upon earth. She refuses the everlasting day and turns to come down again into the twilight mortality with all her immortal stature so that human beings may be rebuilt in that mould.

So they come down, Satyavan and Savitri, from the Supreme heavens, rushing down as heaven's blessing as it were, through ethereal atmospheres, gradually re-assuming the texture of earthly form till they found their material body again upon this concrete earth.

 

A power leaned down, a happiness found its home.

Over wide earth brooded the infinite bliss.¹

 

III

 

THE RETURN

 

Satyavan lay on the green sward, over him and around green branches spread their peaceful felicity. His head reposed upon the lap of Savitri ― exactly as he lay at the last fateful hour confronting the mighty shadow ― as if there were no gap or hiatus in between, the great intervening experience was just a momentary vision and not the ageless Calvary that it seemed to be in the other sphere. But now

The waking gladness of her members felt

The weight of heaven in his limbs. . . .

And all her life was conscious of his life. . .

Human she was once more, earth's Savitri,

Yet felt in her illimitable change.²

 

   ¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book XI, Canto 1, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 712.

   ² Ibid., Book XII, Epilogue, p. 715.

Page 29

Satyavan's being was there:

 

Pure, passionate with the passion of the gods.

Desire stirred not its wings; for all was made

An overarching of celestial rays

Like the absorbed control of sky on plain,

Heaven's leaning down to embrace from all sides earth,¹

 

 

Satyavan now turned to Savitri, vague recollections rose in him and he cried out in wonder:

 

 

"Whence hast thou brought me captive back, love-chained,

To thee and sunlight's walls, 0 golden beam

And casket of all sweetness, Savitri,

Godhead and woman, moonlight of my soul ?"²

 

 

As he gazed upon her, his wonder grew more and more with a new flame of worship in his eyes and he exclaimed once more:

 

"What high change is in thee, 0 Savitri? Bright

Ever thou wast, a goddess still and pure,

Yet dearer to me by thy sweet human parts

Earth gave thee making thee yet more divine."³

 

The embodied Divine does not discard or even minimise the human; on the contrary greatens and heightens this earthly being. It is a sea-change that is wrought in the content and in a certain modality of the form, but the essential form and content remain ― somewhat like the process of fossilisation ― mortality is squeezed out and all is moulded in immortality; the Divinity is there in all its fullness but there is added to it the exquisiteness that earth brings to the human. 

 

And so Savitri says:

 

   ¹

Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book XII, Epilogue, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 716.

   ²

Ibid., p. 717.

   ³

Ibid., p. 718.

Page 30

---

"We have borne identity with the Supreme

And known his meaning in our mortal lives.

 

Yet nothing is lost of mortal love's delight.

Heaven's touch fulfils but cancels not our earth:

 

Still am I she who came to thee mid the murmur

Of sunlit leaves upon this forest verge;

I am the Madran, I am Savitri."¹

 

This is human as human can be, the quintessence of hu­manity; for it is human divinely.

 

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Book XII, EPilogue, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 29, p. 719.

 

Page 31

EIGHT TALKS

 

To Read Sri Aurobindo

 

I LEARNED that you want to know something about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother from me. But then there are three lines of approach: you may want to know about them, know of them or know them. Of course the last is the best. Indeed if you want to know truly something you have to become it. Becoming gives the real knowledge. But becoming Sri Aurobindo and the Mother means what? Becoming a portion of them, a part and parcel of their consciousness ― that is what we are here for. And if you can do that, you know enough. . . .

Once I told you, I think, how to study or approach Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in order to read them or understand their writings. There are two things: studying and reading; I made a distinction between the two. To study Sri Aurobindo is ― I won't say fruitless, that is too strong a word, but it can only be an aid or a supplementary way. Study means: you take the text, you understand mentally each word and phrase; if you don't understand, you take a dictionary and try to catch the external meaning expressed by the words. That may be necessary but it is not the way to approach their works.

Simply to read them in the right way is sufficient. Read, it does not matter what you understand and what you do not, simply read and wait in an expectant silence. In studying you approach them with your external mind, your external intelligence. But what is there in the text is beyond your mind, beyond your intelligence. And to understand mentally means you drive your intellect forward into the thing. It is an effort and takes you only to the outside of the thing. It is an exercise of your brain, developed in that way, but it doesn't take' you very far. Instead of that, suppose you could keep quiet, silence your mind, and only read, without unduly trying to understand,

 

Page 35

and wait for what is there in the text to enter into you. Instead of your intelligence driving forward, pushing forward and trying to catch the thing, let the thing come into you; for what is there in their writings is not words and phrases, dead material, it is something very living, something conscious, that they have expressed in the words, phrases and the sound and rhythm. And I may tell you that each sentence anywhere, not to speak of Savitri, is a living being with whom you have to make acquaintance ― not that you understand or are able to explain, but it is a living being, an entity, a friend, even a Lover whom you have to know. And your attempt in that way will be rewarded. You

will enjoy much more. You may ask: "Just because I open a book and read, how can what are in the lines come to me?" But I say they are living entities ― if you approach in the right spirit, they come into you. The consciousness, the being in each line comes to you. And you find how beautiful it is. This is an approach of love, not of the intellect to understand and explain. Take for example, the very first verse of Savitri:

 

It was the hour before the Gods awake.¹

It is a Mantra, a living person, how beautiful it is, you needn't understand much ― and a whole world is there.

Or, take the opening sentence of The Life Divine ― the rolling cadence of the vast ocean is there. It brings you a sense of vastness, a sense of Infinity and takes you there. And, as I said, it is a very living entity and personality.

Here is the whole passage:

  The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts 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. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated

 

¹ Book I, Canto 1.

Page 36

---

Occult Experiences

 

IT seems my predecessors were telling you stories ― stories of their own lives; their experiences, so I thought I should follow in their footsteps. But I am not going to tell you about my own experiences, I am going to tell a story, rather a history, that happened in the life of another person. It will be interesting and also instructive. So I will begin the story, I am the narrator:

I was a traveller, going about from place to place, seeing all things of interest ― especially those of pilgrimage ― and I happened to be in Madras. I was waiting there to take a bus to the railway-station which was a few miles off. I saw that there were also many other travellers waiting to board a bus. A busman was inviting people, so I approached his bus. Suddenly a lady came out of the crowd and said, "Please don't go there!" She was an elderly Tamil lady. I was surprised and asked, "Why, why?" She said, "Well, wait; you'll see," and I stopped. Then there were three buses that started ― I was in one, the lady was in another and the third was the one I had wanted to board.

The lady's bus came last and the other two were running very fast ― competing as to which should go first. Well, what happened is quite natural; the bus in which I was to go dashed against a wayside tree and was damaged, and the passengers were mostly killed or seriously injured. We reached our destination and naturally I was very eager to see the lady who had stopped me from boarding the bus. I asked her, "How did you know it? How did you guess?" "I'll tell you later on." So we started again, and went to a holy place on a hillside. It was a sort of jungle and woodland, full of bushes. The lady and I were walking quietly together. Then I stepped aside. I wanted to see what was to my left. Suddenly the lady said, "Please,

 

Page 40

please don't go to that side!" Naturally I was surprised and asked her the reason. Then I saw that behind the bushes was a 200 ft. deep precipice. If 1 had taken one step more I would have gone down! Then I pleaded with the lady: "Please tell me what it is; how did you see it?" She said, "All right, I'll tell you the story, let us sit down." Then she narrated the story. She said, "When I was young I lived with my grand father, and we loved each other exceedingly, we were very much attached to each other. He used to tell me stories and pleased me in all ways, so I was with him almost all the time. Then one day he fell rather seriously ill. Doctors were called and they couldn't do anything. Then my grandfather called me and said, 'My child, go and pray to Shiva'-Shiva was the household deity. So I went and knelt down before the image of Shiva and prayed, '0 Shiva, my grandfather is ill, please cure him.' One or two days I did that. But he continued to be ill, he became rather worse! Then one day the doctors gave up all hope. I was weeping standing a little away from him. Suddenly I saw a girl by the side of my grandfather, and I was astonished, she looked exactly like myself. Then I asked someone near me if he could see anyone by my grandfather ― 'No, I don't see anybody'. Then I went to the bedside, and the image and I stood together. Gradually my grandfather was cured. From that time on, wherever there is any danger, any difficulty, this image of myself comes, and helps me. So when you wanted to go in that bus I saw the same figure coming to me and telling me, 'Beware'. I don't know who she is."

So this is the story. I have brought these books because some of the poets have had such an experience.

Alfred de Musset says that from his childhood he had a comrade who was always with him ― he was like a brother to him; he accompanied him in life's joys and sorrows, in dangers and happiness-he was always with him. I shall read out some stanzas:

 

Nuit de Dlcembre¹

 

Du temps que j'étais éIcolier,

Je restais un soir à veiller

 ¹Alfred de Musset: Poésies Choisies, p. 38.

 

Page 41

Dans notre salle solitaire.

Devant ma table vine s' assenir

Un pauvre enfant vêtu de noir,

 Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.

 

 

Son visage était triste et beau:

A la lueur de mon flambeau,

Dans mon livre ouvert il vine lire.

II pencha son front sur ma main,

Et resta jusqu' au lendemain,

Pensif, avec un doux sourire.

 

 

Comme j' allais avoir quinze ans,

Je marchais un jour, à pas lents,

Dans un bois, sur une bruyère.

Au pied d'un arbre vine s'asseoir

Un jeune homme vetu de noir,

Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.

 

 

 

Je lui demandai mon chemin;

II tenait un luth d' une main,

De I' autre un bouquet d' églantine.

II me fit un salut d' ami,

Et, se détournant à demi,

Me montra du doigt la colline.

 

 

Je m' en suis si bien souvenu,

Que je I' ai toujours reconnu

A tous les instants de ma vie.

C' est une étrange vision,

Et cependant, ange ou demon,

J' ai vu partout cette ombre amie.

 

 

Partout où, Ie long des chemins,

J' ai posé mon front dans mes mains

Et sangloé comme une femme;

Partout où, j' ai, comme un mouton

Qui laisse sa laine au buisson,

Senti se dénuer mon âme;

 

Page 42

---

Partout où, j' ai voulu dormir,

Partout où, j' ai voulu mourir,

Partout où, j' ai touché la terre,

Sur ma route est venu s' asseoir  

Un malheureux vêtu de noir,

Qui me ressemblait comme un frère.

 

"Qui donc es-tu, spectre de ma jeunesse,

Pélerin que rien n' a lassé?

Dis-moi pourquoi je te trouve sans cesse

Assis dans I' ombre où, j' ai passé.

Qui donc es-tu, visiteur solitaire,

Hôte assidu de mes douleurs?"

 

Now this form, that the poet saw, replies:

 

"―Ami, noire Père est Ie lien.

Je ne suis ni I' ange gardien,

Ni Ie mauvais destin des hommes . . .

 

Lee ciel m' a confié ton cmur.

Quand tu seras dans la douleur,

Viens à moi sans inquiétude.

Je te suivrai sur Ie chemin;

Mais je ne puis toucher ta main,

Ami, je ne suis que la Solitude."

 

Here is the English translation

 

A  DECEMBER  NIGHT

 

In the days when I was a schoolboy

One evening I kept awake

In my lonely room.

In front of my table there came and sat

A poor child robed in black

Who looked like me even as a brother.

 

He came to read in my open book.

He bent his head upon my hand

And waited till the morn

Musing with a sweet smile.

 

When I was about to be fifteen years old

I was walking one day leisurely

In a woodland upon the heath,

At the foot of a tree there came and sat

A young man robed in black

Who looked like me even as a brother.

 

I asked him my way;

He held a lute in one hand,

And in the other a bouquet of eglantine.

He gave a friendly salute to me

And, half turning,

With his finger pointed to the hillock.

 

I remember him so well,

I have recognised him always

At every moment of my life.

It was a strange vision,

And yet, angel or demon,

I saw everywhere this friendly shadow.

 

Wherever all along my way

I held my forehead in my hands

And sobbed like a woman;

Wherever, like a lamb

That leaves his wool in the bush,

I felt my soul being shed;

 

Wherever I sought to sleep,

Wherever I sought to die,

Wherever I touched the earth

On my road came and sat

A miserable one robed in black,

Who looked like my own brother.

 

Page 44

"Who art thou, phantom of my youth,

Pale pilgrim whom nothing fatigues?

Tell me, why do I find thee constantly,

Seated in the shadow I have passed through?

Who art thou, lonely visitor,

Tireless guest of my pain?"

 

"Friend, our father is also thine,

 I am neither the guardian angel

Nor the evil destiny of men. . . .

 

Heaven has entrusted thy heart to me.

When thou art in pain

Come to me carefree,

I shall follow thee on thy way;

But I cannot touch thy hand,

Friend, I am Solitude."

 

 

The poet thinks that it is the personification of solitude, but it is something more than that. As I said, it is your other self, your subtle self. The body, the personality that you see externally is only a reflection of the inner being that you are. I don't mean your spiritual personality, but your subtle material self ― which is physically your true personality. And that is inspired by something greater which you all know ― your true individuality ― your psychic being. But that being can only be perceived, seen and experienced and heard in solitude, in loneliness ― what you call calmness and quietness and detachment. This vision here, this being of Alfred de Musset says: "I can approach you but I cannot touch you; there is a separation between the two. We can touch only when there are some conditions fulfilled in the physical body."

Another French poet speaks of a similar experience. He speaks of it in a jocular way, in a funny way. He says that this inner self sees things in a quite different way than the external being does. Sometimes it does quite the opposite. While the physical eye says 'It is this', the other says 'No, it is that'. Different values and perceptions ― what we see externally is only Maya. There is only a rope, but you see a snake there ― that is Maya.

 

Page 45

He is a modern French poet, Supervielle. The poem is amusing:

                                  

                                   ALTER EGO¹

 

In my outward experience I see a mouse running away.

"Une souris s' échappe"

(A mouse runs out)

But the other person says:

"ce n' en était pas une"

(It was not there)

The outward person says:

" Une femme s' éveille"

(A woman wakes)

The other says:

"Comment le savez-vous?"

 (How do you know?)

And then my outward sense says:

"Et La porte qui grince"

(And the squeaking door)

On l' huila ce matin"      

(It was oiled this morning)

But if it was oiled this morning, how can it make noise?

"Près du mur de cloture"

(Near the cloister wall)

"Le mur n'existe plus"

(There is now no wall)

 

"Ah! je ne puis rim dire"

(Oh! I can't say a thing)

Because you always say the contrary.

The inner being says:

Eh bien, vous vous taisez!

(Well, now you'll be quiet!)

 

¹ Translated by James Kirkup (New Direction).

Page 46

The outward person says: I can't walk

"Je ne puis pas bouger",

(I cannot move)

"Vous marchez sur La route"

(You're walking along the road)

The outer questioning mind says:

"Où allons-nous aussi?

(Does all this get us anywhere?)

"C'est moi qui le demande"

(I am asking you)

material form does not change much. It changes, yes, according to your age, slowly but for sometime you are the same. These inner forms are changeful; they are not restricted to one rigid figure. Still they are recognisable. There is a plasticity which is very natural; according to the situation, according to your mood, according to your feeling, they change. But the most important, the most original form is your psychic being ― your true being ― that which we must strive to realise and attain. As the Mother says: It is the Divine personality in each one of us. Your outer personality is sometimes only a caricature, but still it tries to reflect, though with difficulty, something of the needs and urges of this inmost reality of yours. Someone has asked me: "How to find, how to know this inner being, the true being in me?" For, as the poet here says, he can't touch you and you can't touch him, but what you want is to touch that person. The fact is that it is not so altogether out of contact, not altogether ― unless a man is a total villain, which is very rare. You can't obliterate that true existence of you, it is there. It expresses itself in all the movements that are good and noble and selfless. Whenever you see something beautiful or do something nice, be sure that it is your psychic being that sees or does it. The psychic being in you is the Mother ― for it is an emanation of Herself that She has put in you, in order to protect you. When you see the sunset and feel happy, it is the psychic being in you that sees it. It is a small beginning but it is a beginning. Let your psychic being guide your acts. The only thing necessary is to be sincere. You have to be sincere. First day you will find it very difficult, second day you will find it easier, third day it will become still easier and then on the fourth day it will become your nature. It is not easy, but if you try you will be able to do it.

 

Page 48

 

I

 

KING JANAKA was a great king and a great sage. He wielded an empire without and equally an empire within: he had realised the Truth, known Brahman. He was svarāt and samrāt. A friend and intimate of his was Rishi Yajnavalkya, who also was a sage ― in fact, considered to be the greatest sage of the time, a supreme knower of Brahman.

Once upon a time King Janaka invited sages from everywhere, whoever wanted to come to the assembly. The king from time to time used to call such assemblies for spiritual discussion and interchange of experiences. This time he summoned the assembly for a special reason. He had collected a herd of one thousand cows and nuggets of gold were tied to the horns of each. When all had gathered and taken their places he announced that whoever considered himself the best knower of Brahman (Brahmishtha) might come forward and take away the cows. None stirred. No one had the temerity to declare that he was the best knower and the most eligible for the prize. The king repeated his announcement. Then all of a sudden people saw Yajnavalkya advancing and telling his disciples to take hold of the herd and drive it home. A hue and cry arose: How is it? How dare he? One came forward and asked Yajnavalkya: How is it, Yajnavalkya? Do you consider yourself the most wise in the matter of Brahman? First prove your claim and then touch the cows. Yajnavalkya in great humility bowed down and said to the asembly: I bow down to the great sages. I have come here solely with the intention of getting the cows. As for the knowledge of Brahman, I leave it to the knowers of Brahman. All the others in one voice said: That will not do,

Yajnavalkya. You cannot get away so easily. Come, sit down and prove your worth. Yajnavalkya had no way of escape. So one by one the sages came up and put questions and enigmas to Yagnavalkya. All he answered quietly and perfectly to their full satisfaction. Towards the end a woman stood up, Gargi, a fair and famous name too. She said: Yajnavalkya, I shall put two questions to you like two arrows directed at you, even as a king shoots his arrows at his enemies; if you can meet and parry them, yours the victory. ― Yajnavalkaya: "Let me hear then". ― Gargi: "Yajnavalkya, you once said that the earth is the warp and woof woven upon water; upon what is woven the water?" ― Yajnavalkya: "Air". ― "Upon what then is air woven?" ― "Sky". ― "Upon what is woven the sky?" ― "The world of Gandharvas." ― "Upon what the Gandharvas?""Upon the Sun." She continued her questioning. And thus she was led successively through higher and higher worlds ― from the Sun to the Moon, then to the Stars, then to the Gods and the King of Gods, then to the Creator of the Gods and the peoples¹ and finally to the Brahmaloka (the world of the One Supreme Transcendent Reality).

Gargi still continued and asked again: "Upon what is Brahman woven?" To this Yajnavalkya cried halt and warned her: "Now, Gargi, your questioning goes too far, beyond the limits. If you question farther, your head will fall off. You are questioning about a thing that does not bear questioning ― mā ati prāksih― anati praśnyā devatā ― the Gods abide not our question." So Gargi had to desist and Yajnavalkya was accepted as the best of the sages (Brahmishtha) and he could drive his cattle away home.

The ultimate reality does not lie within the ken of the questioning mind, the Upanishad emphatically declares. We all know the famous mantra: "naisā tarkena matirāpaneyā ― this consciousness cannot be reached by reasoning nor by intelligence nor by much learning. Indeed the Self, the Divine discloses his body to him alone whom he chooses as his own.

 

¹ It is difficult to locate or identify the Upanishadic worlds or explain their gradations; evidently they are symbolical. But for us it is sufficient if we know that they are mounting steps, higher and higher tiers of being and consciousness leading to the supreme Being and Consciousness, the Brahman.

 

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LAST time I told you the story of the great Rishi Yajnavalkya. But that was about the later Yajnavalkya when he had become a full-fledged rishi, a guru with an Ashram and disciples. Today I will tell you something of the earlier Yajnavalkya, the beginning of his rishihood, the start of his spiritual life. You know the structure of the old Indian society, it consisted of four castes, varnas, and four stages, āśramas. I shall speak of the āśramas now. Each individual person had to follow a definite course of life through developing stages. First of all, naturally, when you are a baby, in your early childhood, you belong to the family and remain with your parents. As soon as you grow up and the time for your education arrives, you are initiated into a stage called brahmacarya; you may generally call it as the stage of self-discipline, you go to a guru and pursue your studies through a disciplined life, something like the life of the children who are here like you. In those days a student's life did not mean merely studies, that is to say, reading and writing, book knowledge, but as here a very active life. The physical education in the old time āśramas in certain ways was even more complete than what is given here, for it included the art of warfare also, combatives like serious archery and many other items of physical training. When you have terminated this discipline or brahmacarya, when you have become an accomplished young man you are allowed to return to the world, and take to the worldly life, enrich yourself with all experiences of that life, that is to say, you marry and become a family man. It is the second stage called gārhashtya. Next when you have fully enjoyed or fulfilled the duty of the worldly life, you pass on to the next stage that is called the vānaprastha . That is the hermit life, the beginning of the true spiritual life. Finally at the

 

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end of the vānaprastha, you pass still beyond and adopt the life of the sannyasi, abandoning everything, concentrating wholly on the Supreme Truth and merging into it.

Now our Yajnavalkya in the normal course of things has passed through the stage of brahmacarya, he has also pursued the stage of domestic life and is now at the end of it. He thinks the time has now come to him to take to spiritual life and enter into vānaprastha. He had married and had two wives. So one day he called the first wife, Katyayani, and said to her: "Katyayani, I am now leaving this life and entering the spiritual life. You have given me comfort and happiness. I am thankful to you for that. Whatever I have, my possessions, movable and immovable, I have divided into two. This is your portion." Katyayani accepted the decision without a murmur. She answered: "Since you are my lord and husband, as you ask me so I shall do." Then Yajnavalkya went to his second wife, Maitreyee; to Maitreyee too he said the same thing as he had said to Katyayani: "Maitreyee, I am leaving this life, I am taking to the spiritual life. I have given to Katyayani her share of my possessions. This is your share." But Maitreyee answered: "Wherever you go, I will follow you, I will also give up the world and its life." Yajnavalkya said: "No Maitreyee, it is a very hard, very difficult life, particularly for a woman. Follow the life to which you have been accustomed. Enjoy freely the possessions I leave you." Then Maitreyee uttered those famous words which you must have heard and which have been ringing through the centuries down to us also, even today: "All these possessions, will they give me immortality?" Yajnavalkya answered: "No, Maitreyee, that they will not give you, it is quite another matter." Maitreyee answered ― uttering a mantra as it were ― "What am I to do with that which does not give me immortality?" So Yajnavalkya had to accept her and allow her to accompany him. Now Yajnavalkya gives his first lesson of spiritual life to Maitreyee: "Maitreyee, you love me, so you are coming with me. But do you know the real truth of the matter? The real truth is that you do not love me, but you love the soul that is in you, which is also in me: you love your own self in me. Therefore you love me. And I love you, I love you not for your sake but for the sake of the self in you which is the self in me. All love is like that. A husband loves his

 

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wife, the wife loves her husband, the brother loves his brother or sister, a sister loves her sister or brother, it is not for the sake of the person or the relation but for the sake of the self-one's own self which is in everybody. That is the first lesson which you have to learn. Forget the outer person, your own person or another's person, find the self that is in you and everybody else. That is the basis of the spiritual life."

I told you there were four stages of life for an individual in the ancient Indian society. You complete one stage and then proceed to the next, and then to the next and so on. But they also say that you need not go through the stages gradually, step by step in this way; you can skip one or two stages in your stride if you have the capacity to do so; if you want the spiritual life when you are young, even when you have not gone through the worldly life, even then you can jump over, take a leap into the life of the sannyāsin. It is said the day you feel detached from your worldly home, then forthwith you may take to the life of the ascetic. It depends upon the urge in you, the insistence of the truth in you. A large freedom was given to all who really wanted a spiritual life.

I have said that Yajnavalkya had two wives. You did not ask me why: for to us moderns such a thing is not only immoral but inconvenient; it is however another story, a long story. In those days, those far-off early days of mankind, thousands and thousands, millions perhaps, of years ago, it was the law, die social custom and it became a duty, to have more than one wife and the relation too between man and woman was much freer and more loose. That was because, as you know, man started his earthly life at a certain stage of creation; before that stage there was no man, there were only animals. The earth was filled with animals, only animals, wild animals, ferocious animals, insects, worms, all kinds of ugly and dangerous creatures. Man came long, long after; he is almost a recent appearance. It was a mysterious, indeed a miraculous happening, how all of a sudden, out of or in the midst of animals there appeared a new creature, quite a different type of animal. Still in whatever way it happened, they were not many in number. The first creation of man must have been a very limited operation, limited in space, limited in number. Perhaps they sprouted up like mushrooms here and there, a hundred here, another

 

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hundred there, or perhaps a few thousands ― few and far between. So man led a dangerous and precarious life. All around him these animals, some too big, some too small to be tackled withstood against him, and Nature also was as wild and as much against him. So for self-preservation and survival they needed to be numerous, to increase in number as much as possible. It is exactly what is needed in war; the larger the number of troops, the greater the chance of winning the war. So the impulse in man, in the social aggregate was to have more men, increase the number, to strengthen the extent and volume of the force to be able to fight successfully against the enemy. So a necessity became a religious duty to multiply, to procreate and redouble the race. In later days, even when the necessity was not so imperative, even then the habit and custom continued. To beget children was a praiseworthy thing, the more the number the greater the merit. Women who had numerous children were considered favourities of the gods. King Dasharatha had, it appears, a thousand wives, King Dhritarashtra had more than a hundred, Vashishtha had a hundred sons and King Sagar a thousand. Draupadi had five husbands and she was considered the ideal chaste woman.

In the modern age we have gone to the other extreme, we have tided over the danger of under-population. At the present day it is over-population that threatens the existence of mankind. Now we are anxious, we are racking our brains, trying to find out all kinds of means and ways to restrict and control any increase in population.

I said, in the early days the need to marry in any way ― a very free choice was given in the matter of the way of marriage ― and to procreate was a social duty: but note it is not for individual pleasure. Today we have discarded all notion of that kind of action as superstition, a form of tyranny. We are for freedom of the individual. Whatever we do we must do for our personal gain, our personal pleasure. But in those days that was not the ideal nor the custom. Even when you marry, you marry not for the sake of personal enjoyment but for the sake of the society, to give birth to healthy and useful children, to increase the number of able-bodied members of your society. Service for society, not personal pleasure was the aim. Yajnavalkya lifted that ideal on to a still higher level ― you exist not

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for your own sake of course-own means the personal ego individual ― but for the sake of your soul, the greater self.

In this connection I am reminded of what Sri Aurobindo said when he was taking leave of his students at Calcutta in his farewell address before starting his public political activity: he said, "When I come back I wish to see some of you becoming rich, rich not for yourselves but that you may enrich the Mother with your riches. I wish to see some of you becoming great, great not for your own sakes, not that you may satisfy your own vanity, but great for her, to make India great. . ." ¹: that is the ideal ideal, not individual satisfaction, exclusively personal accomplishment or achievement; one must work in view of the welfare of all, a global well-being. The goal is not one's own little self, but the Great Self in all. This is of course, in the secular way in the secular field. But here also the appeal, it must be observed, is not to the social life as a mere machine of which individuals are dead helpless parts and units meant to serve as obedient instruments in the production of useful goods. The appeal on the contrary is to the soul, the free inner individual, choosing its destiny but with a view to collaborating and uniting with others in the realisation of a global truth.

In the spiritual sphere also Sri Aurobindo gives us the same ideal and outlook. In the early days spiritual realisation was sought for personal salvation, a complete renunciation of the world, absolute freedom from this transient unhappy world  ― anityam asukham lokam imam. The individual person leaves his individual existence upon earth and retires and merges into the Infinite Brahman. But here in Sri Aurobindo's Revelation we are taught that the individual realisation and spiritual attainment is not to dissolve oneself into the nameless formless Beyond but to maintain it, preserve it in a pure divine form, for the sake of the sorrowful ignorant world. The knowledge, the power, the delight that the individual gains-not as something merely individual but as the result of one's identity with the universal ― are at the service of earth and humanity so that these may be transformed and share in the same realisation. One becomes spiritually free and complete and enters into all so that all may be transformed into a new divine reality.

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo' Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 1, p. 516.

 

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TODAY I shall speak to you of the golden rule. When we were children we were taught, specially at school, at home too, certain golden rules. If you observe these rules you become good, good boys and good girls, you are loved and appreciated by all. These rules are simple and very commonplace; you know them all and must have tried them. For example such things as "speak the truth, do not tell a lie, obey your parents, respect your teachers, do not hurt anybody" etc., etc. That was the basis on which one was to build one's character, mould one's nature, prepare for a pure stainless noble life.

They are good, these rules, so far as they go: but to say the truth, they do not go very far. They do not touch you intimately. They enter, as it is said, your head through one ear and pass out through the other. They do not quicken your heart and involve your soul. You follow if you are very earnest one rule or another for a few days and then you forget.

The other day I spoke to you of Yajnavalkya; he gave a better rule that was nearer to the golden rule. What he said in effect was that instead of following these outward rules or formulas you must leave them aside, go within yourself and find your self. Yajnavalkya said: you love your neighbour, not because he is your neighbour or brother, but because you find yourself in him. Find the Self, that is the golden rule. Find the Self that is in you, you will find that very Self in your neighbour, in all.

Here however you must take care not to confuse yourself with your Self. When it is said that you find your Self it is not your personal self that you find in another as if you grasp it as your own, exclusively your own possession. This Self is not the ego, it is beyond ego, it is not the kind of self-hood that Shakespeare  

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depicts in King Richard where the King, deprived of everything, left all alone in the whole world, exclaims: "Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I"¹, for it is not a separative I-ness; the other I's are dissolved as well as the one I that I am, and all become one person or self. It is all one self, one soul although they may appear different, as different I's.

Here I will tell you a story narrated to our children. There used to be every evening a meeting where seekers and enquirers after the spiritual life assembled and conversed or meditated on the subject. There used also to come to that meeting a remark able woman who had true realisations and was ready to help others on the path. Once the talk turned on souls and their re-birth and she was telling how after the death of the body souls pass out into another world, and when the time comes each one returns to the earth and takes a human body. Now there was one in the audience who felt a little puzzled about this matter of birth and wanted clarification. She put a question: (it was a she): "You say that souls come down and take birth, that is to say, assume a human body. But people are increasing in number upon earth, every year the human population becoming larger and larger. Now the question is: the additional number of people born every year, where were they before? Were they there all along since the creation, waiting? Do they appear gradually as time passes and bide their hour?" We in the modern age may suggest an analogy. Is it like the stars or galaxies that are gradually coming into our ken, phenomenally distant stars whose lights are taking time to reach the present day earth? The questioner asked: "Is there a fixed number of souls, can they be counted?" The speaker answered, "Yes, they are limited and they can be counted." With great curiosity and eagerness the questioner asked: "How many? how many?" Quietly the one who was speaking extended her hand and put out one single index finger, and said: "Only one."

So, that is the truth. All these many bodies, many persons you see, it is only appearance, there is only one Soul and every one is that. If you realise this truth, you can love everyone equally, not merely love but be one with all, because you are all and all are you. That universal Self, your own true Self

 

¹ Shakespeare: Richard the Third, Act V, Scene 3. 

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you have to find, you have to know, you have to become. That is the golden rule as the ideal.

How to attain, how to realise it? The Mother in this matter has given us a golden rule, a truly golden rule and very simple. Generally we are confused as to our duty – what to do, what not to do, how to do, how not to do. The Mother says to her children: "Do not do what you will hesitate to do or be ashamed of doing in my presence. Do not say anything which you will hesitate to say or be ashamed of saying in my presence. Do not think even what you will find awkward to think in my presence" Well, try this way and you will find what a golden rule and a simple rule it is. Sri Aurobindo confirmed and said the same thing. He says, – you all know the well-known phrase – "Always behave as if the Mother was looking at you; because she is, indeed, always present." You need not imagine that she is there; for she is actually always there whether you imagine or not; you do not know, for you are blind but she is always there, seeing you, observing you, guiding you, protecting you. She not only sees what you do, but even what you feel inside you, even your. most secret thoughts. A child asked the Mother in his simplicity: “How do you know, Mother, what we do, what we think, what we feel, how do you know it?" The Mother smiled and answered, "My child, because you are within me, within my embrace always. Therefore I know. I know what is happening in me, isn't it? That is why I see what is happening in you. You are not outside me, you are part of myself, I am you."

Now if you follow this simple rule sincerely and persistently you will see the change miraculously happening in you, you will become the golden child of the golden Mother. You will find your thoughts, your words, your feelings, your impulses putting on a new colour, even your body will take a new glow of health and beauty. Normally our brain is made of mud, our thoughts are unclean – we have wrong thoughts, dark thoughts, our tongue also is made of mud or clay, we speak wrong things, impure things, our heart too is made of the same substance, giving out wrong feelings and unclean feelings; lower down in our nature in the vital region our impulses are also wrong and muddy and unclean, finally, the body is mud itself, it is made of diseases and weaknesses and incapacities. We are, as 

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it were, a container containing this ugly and unclean mixture. What we have to do is to pour into it the golden liquid, molten gold that will wash away all that impurity and filth, clean the vessel and fill it with its own radiant substance, the molten gold which is the Mother's presence.

This process has been beautifully described by Sri Aurobindo in one of his poems. I conclude by reading out those magnificent lines:

 

THE GOLDEN LIGHT ¹

 

Thy golden Light came down into my brain

                        And the grey  rooms of mind sun-touched became

A bright reply to Wisdom's occult plane,

                        A calm illumination and a flame.

 

Thy golden Light came down into my throat,

                        And all my speech is now a tune divine,

A paean-song of thee my single note;

                        My words are drunk with the Immortal's wine.

 

Thy golden Light came down into my heart

                        Smiting my life with Thy eternity;

Now has it grown a temple where Thou art

                        And all its passions point towards only Thee.

 

Thy golden Light came down into my feet:

My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat.

 

¹ Collected Poems, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 5, p. 134. 

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WE are a larger assembly here today – we have increased in number.... Now, we all want to be good boys and good girls, is it not? Nobody wants to be a bad boy or a bad girl; but the problem is how to be a good boyar girl and how not to be a bad boy or girl. In what does goodness consist? You all know the fine gesture that Mother taught us once. Gesture means a physical movement – here a physical movement to control yourself; control, self-control is a very important, a very necessary item of our life. So the Mother once said; supposing you are very angry and you are inclined to give a blow to your comrade, then, the Mother's advice is, instead of stretching your hand towards your friend to give him a blow, put it in your pocket; that is a fine gesture and it brings you a fine result: you feel a kind of release, a joy and peace, something new arid fresh comes into you. Your anger is gone, you are almost a new person. That is the lesson Mother taught us in the matter of controlling ourselves. Usually we are moved by our impulses and passions particularly towards wrong things, then what you need is to check yourself, to control yourself. You must note that this control you are taught is self-control, that is to say, it is a thing not forced upon you, you are not compelled to do it. You do it because of your own will, because you like to do it, because it is a fine gesture that attracts you. Usually the control is imposed upon you, out of fear of punishment, because of inconvenient or unpleasant results that might follow your loss of control. So instead of an outsider ruling you, you rule yourself voluntarily. The Mother adds also, illustrating the point: to train, that is to say, to control a wild horse what you do is to put a bridle in its mouth and hold it and check it. That is good for an animal who does not know what he is; for 

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a man, he can do better; he can put the bridle himself in his own mouth, that is what controlling oneself is. It means as a human being you have been given freedom; it is given so that you may choose yourself what is to be done and what is not to be done. Instead of being forced to do the right thing you are given the alternatives either to do the right or do the wrong, to choose between the two and choose the right thing of your free will. Here in the Ashram, the Mother has said very many times, you have been given almost infinite freedom. There are of course certain rules and regulations; naturally when you live in society and have common work to do, there must be some rules and regulations. But the beauty here is that even if you break a rule, even a very important rule, you are not punished. In other words, the choice is left to you, you have broken the rule, you yourself find that you have broken the rule and then you try and rectify yourself, do the right thing. That is the true function of freedom – it is not freedom to do anything you like but to discipline yourself, to follow the right of one's own free will. A discipline here is not inflicted upon you, you are not ordered to do one thing and not to do another under pain of punishment, but you find the truth by yourself and for yourself and you do it yourself, and you have the joy, the pleasure of doing the right thing and the happiness of growing, maturing in your consciousness. You have infinite freedom here so that you may grow in your consciousness infinitely.

            I was speaking of self-control, self-discipline in your inner being, that is to say, with regard to your desires and impulses and feelings. It is however the same discipline as you follow with regard to your body in the playground. Physical education means nothing else than controlling and disciplining the body. You control and discipline the body through physical exercises and these mean controlled and guided movements. You have to make these movements in a regular, persistent, ordered and a neat way, it is the way to make your body strong and beautiful. As by means of this physical discipline you secure a strong and beautiful body, even so by the inner discipline, by controlling your passions and impulsions you build an inner body strong and beautiful. Yes, even like a physical body you have a subtle body, a body as it were within this material frame. It is 

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not, however, for that reason, something vague and imprecise, on the contrary, it is very concrete and has a definite shape. As I said, by controlled and directed movements you make this outer body strong and beautiful; the inner body also in the same way through controlled and directed inner movements can be made strong and beautiful. In properly doing the physical exercises, you know, two things are needed: first of all, doing the physical movements according to the rules, in other words, exercising the muscles in a given manner, and then along with it relaxation. Relaxation and excercise should alternate. Relaxation restores the muscles, brings repose to the system and serves as a kind of basic support. In the field of the inner discipline, this relaxation corresponds to what I have called freedom. And the muscular exercises correspond to the excercise of your will and consciousness in regard to the inner body.

     The building up of the inner beautiful body has a great influence upon the building of the physical body, it adds something, it gives a feeling of inherent capacity, firmness and charm even to the physical frame.

Many find it difficult at the outset to make the right movement even in the matter of physical exercises. What is n6eded is will and persistence. More difficult, much more difficult it is to make the right inner movement, there also what is needed is will and persistence. Sometimes in the matter of inner discipline which means doing the right thing, you say, "If I know the right thing to do, then I can do it; to do the right thing I must know the right thing. If I do not know the right thing, how can I do it?" In the same way many exclaim: "How to find God, how to see God? I do not know what God is. Then how can I try to find Him?" They say: "First you must see God, then you can believe." In fact this is not true. The truth is the other way round. The Mother says, "If you are sincere, absolutely sincere and you take the resolution that you will do the right thing whatever happens, then surely the right thing will reveal itself to you." But the basic condition is that. Your resolve must be there, to do the right whenever it presents itself to you whatever the cost. Indeed you are not, a human being is not so obscure and inert as the appearance shows. There is a soul in everyone, there is a light within you which always points to the right. Only you are absent-minded, you do not care to look around and be

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on the alert. If you care, truly want to see the light, you will see it there before you. You must be ready to recognise it. It all depends upon your will, your good will, your inner sincerity. The inner sincerity will show you your path, the next step you are to take and you will know more and more as you advance. But if you hesitate, if you have in the background of your mind as it usually happens, the feeling that even if you see the right thing you may not do it, you may not be prepared to face too much difficulty or opposition in the execution. The very wavering thought that you may not do it will obscure your path and the light will not be there. You have to believe, believe blindly, for you know what you believe in is not anything wrong or mistaken, for your urge is to welcome the truth, a sincere readiness to welcome the truth when it comes, this will bring forward the truth and if you proceed, proceed in this way, welcoming the light every time it comes, disregarding all other pulls and distractions, your welcoming becomes easier and warmer and the light grows brighter and brighter. By your faith and trust you increase the power of your discrimination, increase the force of your character, increase the influence of a growing light upon your nature and your inner being; your true person in you grows in stature, grows in strength and beauty.

In this path there is another line for growth and development which is of considerable importance as you will see. You are here or for that matter anywhere in society-not alone but you live together with others. You study together, play together, work together. You have friends, comrades, companions, you are in a group, in a company. Now it is of great importance to have the right company, you must have good companions, good comrades, good friends. That will help you in ways more than one. In this connection I can do nothing better than just to read out what the Mother says on the subject. She says: usually in your ignorance and simplicity, foolish simplicity, you choose convenient friends, that is to say, those who praise you, flatter you, who do not contradict you even if you go the wrong way, even they encourage you in doing the wrong thing in order to be friendly with you. Such friends are dangerous, dangerous to yourself and dangerous to your so-called friends too. Here is the text of the Mother's words: 

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C'est cela qui doit être à la base de l'attitude que l'on est en droit d'attendre d'un véritable ami: il ne doit pas vouloir que vous lui ressembliez, mais que vous soyez, au contraire, tel que vous êtes.

Et j’avais écrit: "Notre meilleur ami est celui qui nous aime dans le meilleur de nous-mêmes.’’ D'une façon un peu plus positive, je dirai: celui qui vous encourage à descendre au niveau le plus bas de vous-même, qui vous pousse à faire des sottises avec lui, ou à devenir vicieux avec lui, ou qui vous approuve dans tout ce que vous avez de vilain, celui-là n' est pas votre ami. Et pourtant, trés souvent, beaucoup trap souvent, on fait son ami de celui avec lequel on n' est pas gêné quand on est au-dessous de soi-même. On s’associe avec ceux qui courent au lieu d’aller à l’école et qui vane voter des fruits dans les jardins, avec ceux qui se moquent de leurs pro-fesseurs et qui font toutes sortes de chases vilaines; c’est pourquoi j’ai dit: "Ceux-là ne sane pas vas bans amis." Mais enfin, ce sane les amis les plus confortables, payee qu’ils ne vous donnent jamais l'mpression que vous êtes en faute. Tandis qu’à celui qui viendrait vous dire: "Dis done, au lieu d' alley courir, à ne rien faire, ou a faire des bêtises, si tu venais en classe, tu crois que ce ne strait pas mieux?’’ – à celui-là, généralement, on répond: "Tu m’embêtes, tu n'es pasmon ami.’’

.... Il faut considérer comme son meilleur ami celui qui se refuse à participer à une action mauvaise ou laide, celui qui vous encourage à resister aux tentations inférieures; celui-là, c' est l' ami.

C'est avec lui qu’il faut vous associer et non avec celui qui fortifie vos mauvais penchants et participe à vos mauvaises actions.¹

 

¹ Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, August 1961, pp. 38-41. "That should be the basis of the attitude which one has the right to expect from a true friend: he must not wish that you should be like him, but that you should be on the contrary, what you are.

And I wrote, "Our best friend is he who loves us in our best part." In a more positive way, I would say: he who encourages you to descend to the lowest level in you, who drives you to do stupid things with him or become vicious along with him or approves all that is vile in you is not your friend. And yet, very often, much too often, you make a friend of him with whom you do not feel uneasy when you are below your own self. You associate with those who run about instead of going to school, who would steal fruits from gardens, those who poke fun at their teachers and who do all sorts of nasty things. That is why I said, "Such people are not your good friends". But they are the friends who are very comfortable, because they never give you the impression that you are in the wrong. Whereas if one comes and tells you, "I say, instead of roaming about doing nothing or doing stupid

things, why not go to your class, don't you think it would be better?" To such a person you would generally reply, "you are troublesome, you are not my friend."  One should regard him only as his best friend who refuses to take part in a bad or ugly act, who encourages you to resist all lower temptations. He is indeed your friend.

      It is with him that you should associate and not with one who strengthens your

And the Mother adds:

 

Au fond, on ne devrait prendre pour amis que des gens plus sages que soi-même, des gens done la compagnie vous ennoblit et vous aide à vous surmonter, à progresser, à agir mieux et à voir plus clair. Et finalement, le meilleur ami que l'on puisse avoir, n'est-ce point le Divin? le Divin à qui l'on peut tout dire, tout révéler, payee que c’est la qu’est la source de toute miséricorde, de tout pouvoir d' effacer l'erreur quand elle ne se reproduit plus, qui peut ouvrir la route vers la realisation veritable; le Divin qui peut tout com prendre, tout guérir, qui vous aide sur le chemin à ne pas faiblir, ne pas broncher, ne pas tomber et qui vous méne tout droit au but. C' est Lui, l' ami vrai, l' ami des bans et des mauvais jours, celui qui ne fait jamais défaut. Quand on l'appelle sincèrement, Il est toujours là pour vous guider, pour vous soutenir et pour vous aimer de la vraie façon. ¹

 

So you see, the best friend that you can have, the Mother says, is the Divine Himself, that is to say, the Mother Herself. You can find no other friend so friendly, so loving and so lovable. Do not think she is too great for you, she is very far and you are very small. It is not true. She can be, she can make herself as small as yourself to be with you: because she is you.

I will tell you here a personal story. When we were together with Sri Aurobindo, long long ago, we were almost as young as you are, not quite though, only a few years older: we had then like you, infinite freedom, we did almost whatever we liked, went wherever it pleased us to go, we did not care much for food or dress or luxuries but we liked pleasant picnics, and along with that of course a little bit of study: but studying not any imposed lessons, studying whatever we liked, whatever we chose to read. Then one day, years after, Sri Aurobindo told us-we were at that time only four or five in number-he told us, somewhat seriously, he was seldom serious or grave with us,

 

¹ "In reality, you should take as friends only those persons who are wiser than you, whose company ennobles you, helps you to transcend yourself, to progress, to act better and see clearer. And finally, the best friend that one can have, is it not the Divine? the Divine to whom one can say everything, disclose everything, because here is the source of all kindness, of the power that effaces every error when it is no longer repeated, which can open the path to the true realisation; the Divine who can understand everything, cure everything, who helps you on the way not to waver, not to falter, not to fall down and who leads you straight the goal. He is the true friend, the friend in good and bad days, who never ails you. When you call him sincerely, he is always there to guide you, to sustain you and love you in the true way." – O p. cit. 

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he had always his smile – “You have so forgotten yourselves, you do not think even of what you have come here for (because we had all left our family, even our country and all worldly considerations); to be with you, to be one of you, I have made myself very small, I have cut myself so to say to your size to walk with you, to be on the same level. Even then you cannot follow, I seem to be still too far from you. That won't do. Now you must try to run and come up to me. I cannot make myself still smaller. I have made myself sufficiently small."

I may remind you here of what Sri Krishna did in this line, something very similar. Sri Krishna, the Divine, became a very ordinary playmate of cowherd-boys and village maids and was one of them and with them, almost with no apparent difference. The Divine not merely as the Master, the Guru, the leader or the captain but as a loving playmate and comrade is a very extraordinary Indian conception of the Divine. Arjuna in his loving tenderness for his friend Krishna almost forgot to respect him and. honour him, he could only embrace him. But one day revelation came to him as to who his intimate friend and comrade really was: he was dumbfounded and full of contrition and repentance for his past lapses. I may tell you Arjuna's state of mind in his own words – as stated in the Gita:

 

For whatsoever I have spoken to Thee in rash vehemence, thinking of Thee only as my human friend and companion, 'O Krishna, O Yadava, O Comrade,' not knowing this Thy greatness, in negligent error or in love, and for whatsoever disrespect was shown by me to Thee in jest, at play, on the couch and the seat and in the banquet, alone or in Thy presence, O faultless One, I pray forgiveness from Thee, the Immeasurable.¹

 

However what I wanted to say is, the Mother is truly your mother and as truly your friend and comrade. She loves you as no one else can love. She answers to your love as no one else can. And she teaches you how to love. Even if you are full of errors and mistakes; it does not matter, she takes you as you are, you can be quite free and open to her, she is there to understand you, to help you. She is not there to scold you or find

 

 The Gita: XI, 41-2. 

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fault with or criticise you. If you are not able to correct yourself, you have simply to look to her, she will do what is needful for you. I have always spoken to you of a body beautiful, an inner body beautiful and an outer body beautiful – any wrong thought or feeling or act leaves a stain, a scar upon your inner body, you are to see that the stain goes away and the body resume its glow, you are not always able to do it with your own will and effort because you do not know how to do it, but only try not to repeat the error and take your shelter in the Mother's presence, in her arms. The stain disfigures your inner beauty, you have to pray and appeal to her: with her healing touch she will remove all stain and disfiguring mark. It is an experience that some of you must have had in some way or other, must have felt in dream at least, the loving embrace of the Mother. You have to live in it, live it even in your waking hours. Be sincere and ask for it, your wish will be granted. 

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IN its early days, quite at the beginning, we may now say, long long ago, for it is now almost half a century ago, the Ashram from its very start and quite spontaneously and inevitably grew into a community life. That is to say, the individuals ceased to have any personal possessions. Whatever they had belonged not to themselves but to the group, rather to the Master of the group, the Guru, to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Whatever they had, they considered as having received from the Mother for use only. They are not proprietors or possessors of anything: whatever they needed or they thought they needed, they had to ask for it and the Mother decided what they should have or not. It was a joyous surrender of possessions and a grateful acceptance of gifts. One may yet remember the beautiful movement that impelled each one of those who were fortunate to be there at that time. One is reminded of a parallel movement, although on a different field, described by Tagore in his well-known lines:

 

 

There was a scuffle and scramble

A great hurry as to who would be the first to throw away his life.

 

Well, it was a picture worth contemplating. Here is one carrying his trunk or valise or wallet, and placing it before the Mother, displaying all his possessions and receiving them back from her as her gift. She did not take away anything as superfluous or not necessary! It was for us to judge and decide what was really necessary and what was luxury. We had to be sincere. She was generosity itself.

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The life of each one was directly linked with the Mother. The relation between individuals was founded on the relation each one had with the Mother. It did not depend on one's liking (or disliking), one's attraction (or repulsion): but it was as necessitated by the need of the common life as arranged by the Mother.

Such a life was possible because of two reasons: (i) a physical reason and (ii) a psychological reason. The physical reason was, the number of people forming the Ashram was very small: instead of the two thousand and odd that we are today, there were at that time (the time I am speaking of) barely fifty. And there were no children.¹ And of men, only those who were allowed, who had a real call for the spiritual life, those alone who were chosen by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and permitted to live here. And here is the natural psychological reason: it was a select group who had already had an inner life and spiritual aspiration. And so they were ready for a life of surrender and self-giving, obedience and allegiance to the guru. They did not come ignorant and innocent of the rudimentary elements of spiritual life.

The work that Mother could do then and was doing, she has herself described and explained to us. It was the creation of a world – a region at least – of the higher consciousness in which everyone who participated had his own place, everyone with his soul-being sufficiently in front; and this being she could connect or link up with a being of the higher sphere – a counterpart, an over-soul as it were for each soul. It was a kind of descent – a subtle incarnation of Gods which the Mother's Grace occasioned or brought about into the elevated and sublimated human level.

The ground had already been prepared, we may note, by the descent of the 24th November 1926 – the descent of the Overmind or Krishna-consciousness into Sri Aurobindo's body-consciousness and thence generally into the earth-atmosphere and becoming its natural and permanent possession.

But arrived at one point, Sri Aurobindo happened to make an observation which meant halt! The Mother narrates to us the story in an amusing way. One day Sri Aurobindo was telling the Mother: "What you are doing is very fine and very

 

¹ The first child that came was Anu, then five years old.

 

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grand. It will bring you name and fame, you will become a world-figure and your work a marvel. It will be a "grand succès." Well, that was sufficient. The whole thing dropped from Mother's hands. The new creation vanished in a moment, as it were: there was a pralaya.

The Gods withdrew, we came down with a thud upon earth – down to earth, earth to earth. We are still there, crawling, forward I hope, as best as we can.

This creation of a luminous world in a higher sphere of the mind which Mother attempted could not be fully achieved; for the foundations were not properly laid, the basic ground was not prepared. Any higher structure of the mind and overmind must be built upon man's vital being and physical life. The new creation left out of account these realities of basement, so one had to come down, forgetting for the moment the higher realisation, into these darker regions and make a thorough cleaning of them. The regions of the vital consciousness and physical consciousness are, as we all know, full of human failings and dangerous complications. One had to leave the heavens and come down to these lower levels and tackle the problems that beset them, the crucial problems whose solution alone could lay a strong foundation for the final consummation, the supreme transformation. One had to face the stark realities there and master them before one could think of a heavenly ascent. So we all became once more ordinary human beings with human weaknesses and a modicum of aspiration perhaps. This was then the task given to all to battle through and conquer here below. The scene changed completely. A mid-summer night's dream turned almost into a sombre Hamlet-tragedy.

The first sign of this Return, this resumption of life as it is, was the re-assertion of the individual, the feedom of the personal unit. Because of the increased number of people and because of the incursion of children, the earlier frame could no longer hold good. The willing surrender of individuality is a lesson that has to be acquired and achieved: it is not just God's gift, for the many. The many have to grow, grow by degrees, through toil and trouble, and slowly led into the mysteries of the higher realisation of surrender and self-giving. And towards that consummation independence, freedom, is the first step. But once the climb down begins, it does not admit of an

 

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arrest, it becomes slidedown, a continuous descent until you reach the very rock-bottom of the vale of tears. The Roman poet spoke of the easy descent down the cliffs to the river.¹

The realisation aimed at demands a wholesale change, an integral transformation; it does not rest content with a partial success, an attainment on one level, on one portion of the being. There is therefore a global shake-up, nothing is allowed to remain in its old status unnoticed, all must come out and declare themselves to the Light. Hence the darkness of it all. All the impurities, imperfections and vilenesses show themselves – the grass-roots as they say, that have to be extirpated and the ground ploughed and furrowed – prepared for the new seed. It is a difficult time, the heroic soul must bear and stand, know what it is and move bravely on.

I spoke of the community-ideal that obtained among us at the outset of our life here, that broke to pieces. Individualism reared its gruesome head with all its inevitable consequence: egoism had uncontrolled sway, instead of submission and surrender and obedience, freedom attained complete freedom, liberty pushed to licence.

Like individuals collective bodies also (in the matter of work and enterprises) were allowed freedom to grow – or perhaps not to grow – independently. Each group or section, each undertaking sought to depend upon itself, secured its own personal equipment and resources: its gains were its own; and naturally losses were bound to be more than the gains, the real gain was perhaps the experience. The experience is meant to develop the consciousness and it is hoped that the consciousness did make a gain.

The freedom, the devolution or departure from the centre control went so far as to bring about, as I say, almost a real separation between the two: the same tendency, by the way, as we may notice in the play of world politics today.

The limbs declared their independence and sought and fought for this independence but that could only be at the cost of the Heart. The calvary of the Divine lay precisely here: it is due to this sense of separation, an individual exclusive self-existence prevailing in his children, issues of his own body. The

 

¹ Virgil: Aeneid, Book II, v. 126

       FaciliS descensus Averni...

 

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units in the cosmic body of the Divine in the Ignorance are indeed ignorant; and the force that compels them to be together apparently is the forced bond of ignorance, they seem outwardly to press towards inevitable disintegration and chaos.

In reality however, this movement of dispersion out of bounds, a flight away from the centre, harbours a reverse movement in it, a self-conscious advance towards a re-awakening to the one central consciousness that is in all, that is all.

This is an intermediate stage when the faults, the imperfections in the creation, the wrong forces that issued from and were inherent in the original Ignorance and first separation had to be tracked and met, could not be allowed to lie dormant eternally; therefore they rose and declared themselves so that the Light can deal with it and swallow it.

One remembers the legend of the Vedic Rishi Agastya and his consort who once attempted a new and renovated creation. They were engaged in a tremendous and superhuman labour to discover the roots of evil upon earth: they dug up, opened out its very bowels: they went deeper and deeper, layers after layers of obstructive darkness till they arrived at the very source of the Night. They brought in there with them a light that could produce a reversal of consciousness changing darkness into radiance.

The lower sphere of the vital and the physical is a mass of ignorant nature (prakriti) – all moving together helplessly, mechanically, bound together indissolubly to one inexorable fate, and it stands on the rock of utter unconsciousness – the Inconscient – which is the very basis and stuff of that sphere. Consciousness, the conscient Being has to come down or emerge and penetrate there, break the hard block of inert matter, striking and scattering and throwing up as it were, its myriad disparate bits, turning them into particles of Light and Consciousness. These free sparks, the first-born of consciousness at the outset become erratic, errant conscious units, free but fighting against each other, each exclusive in its unitary consciousness: but that was the way towards a purer, higher, wider, integrating consciousness. As the consciousness works and moves forward, the dross, the grit is blown away and it works towards a clearer light and a harmonic weaving of all component units.

 

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Weare thus in a transition period, it is an interregnum, it is beset with great difficulties but they are also great opportunities. The calvary is not merely a passage of pain and suffering, it is a purgatory, that is to say a period or a zone, a process where the being and consciousness is cleaning itself, throwing off its own scales, shuffling its old skin and in course of time it will come out in a rejuvenated body and in a harmonious setting. The Paradise lost will one day be thus regained. Paradise Lost thus will have one day inevitably as its sequel and consummation Paradise Regained.

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ON a sea-coast – a fairly large tract of land opening out on the vast sea and the infinite sky – among rocks and cliffs there lived a flock of sea-gulls, rather flocks of sea-gulls, – for they were almost innumerable, in hundreds and perhaps in thou sands – a whole colony of them. Have you seen a sea-gull, at least in a picture? This beautiful bird, spotlessly white end to end, and when in flight with outspread wings and its delicate supple body so pleasing, so wonderful to look at! Do you know their routine, their daily preoccupations? Of course, the first thing in the morning for them to do was to fly out and look for food. Their food is naturally fishes. So these birds used to fly a certain distance out to sea and from above look down and spot the swimming fishes below and dart down, catch them and fly up again; then they came back to their places and shared their catch among themselves. Naturally there was a good deal of scrambling and fighting but that was part of the life. And there after, most of the time, they passed in dozing or sleeping or at times flying out once again to sea for a forage. And of course there was the item of mating and begetting children. That was their life and they continued it day after day, year after year. They were, I suppose, quite content with the life they were leading.

Now, it happened that one of these sea-gulls thought otherwise. Yes, a thought entered into him. Why should not a thought enter into the head of a bird? A new thought, a faith did enter into the heart of a human child as reported in the Upanishads, so this bird with his questioning thought found the ordinary bird-life quite uninteresting. He wondered: why lay so much stress upon food and sleep and quarelling and increasing the population? He found flying itself a beautiful

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adventure. Why fly just a few miles, only to come back, flop down and roost? Why not fly out, out into the vast sea abroad and the limitless sky overhead? Having wings, he thought they were strong enough to fly him far and high; he would try.

So from that time he separated himself from his tribe and went out on his own for the joy of long journeys and long flights. It was pure delight for him and he increased the distance of his flight from day to day, from a hundred to a thousand miles or more. And he found himself gradually incredibly stronger in body, unbelievably happy within. Food or sleep or rest did not trouble him any more. When he was thus practising this new adventure, two or three of his comrades noticed it and became interested. So these approached him and asked what the matter was. He explained to them what he was about, he was not happy with the old common life, he wanted a new, broader, more vigorous life. The newcomers were allured by the project and they wanted to join the new adventure. They were gladly accepted.

their gathering speed they went through all movements of vaulting, somersaulting, twirling, twisting and so on. They made their bodies a wonderful mass of supple energy and even radiant energy.

 At this point one day all on a sudden they saw at a distance a bird of their kind but somewhat different, more beautiful, more glorious. They approached him, or perhaps he approached them and said, "I was observing you and I found what you were doing is wonderful. Your achievement is really marvellous. But there is something more yet to do. I have come to teach you what you have still to do for your true fulfilment. Till now you were moving on the same plane, all your progress has been made in one dimension. I will explain: " – You have learnt 'moving' flight. You have to learn now un-moving or still flight. This is a contradiction in terms? In the new dimension you have to reconcile or unify the contradictions. Listen carefully, I give you the mystery of still flying. It is getting as I said into another dimension of space, or another kind of space – it is better I give you a practical demonstration." "Come," he said addressing Shobhanaka, "Stand here on your legs straight, firm and unmoving – by my side. Normally when you fly, first you have the will to fly, then that will you put forth into your body, into your muscles and nerves spreading it out as it were into your wings, making your wings mobile. Now what you have to do is an opposite movement. Instead of sending your will and energy outward, as if throwing it out, you gather the will and energy within yourself, that is, concentrate within you your will and energy instead of spilling them out. The whole thing depends upon this concentration, this gathering up your energy and will on one point within you and then just look, that is to say, with your thought or consciousness, at the point where you  ant to go. It is like a strung-bow with its arrow pointing at the target. And then let yourself go as it were. Indeed if your concentration is perfect you will leap straight into your target without, as it would seem, passing through the intermediary stages – telescoping, as it were, all the intervening steps into one single step – a long jump at a lightning speed. Now try to do what I told you. Feel what I am doing."

been by his side but now, there afar on another cliff. At the next moment the expert flyer was back at his place as before by the side of his pupil. The pupil exclaimed in admiration: "It is an impossibility, but since you have done it I will try to do it." "Yes", the Elder-one said, "I too did not succeed in one day or in one attempt. It takes some time, even a long time. But persistence, perseverance and faith undiscouraged will bring you the victory."

"Here I give you the ultimate, the supreme secret," the Elder continued, "the inner core of the teaching. This body, this substance made of solid matter that seems so rigid, compact, hard, is really not so; you must have realised it by this time. You cannot even say that this body-material is an encasement for the storage and play of energy which is the true reality behind: it is not so. The body, the physical structure is only an idea, it is a perception: you perceive that there is your body, it does not exist outside your perception, your perception is an immaterial thing. The whole body so neatly outlined, so concretely static is only a combination of ideas and precepts, a projection of your mind: from tip to tip your outspread wings consist only of your thoughts as if strung together. If that is so you can naturally manipulate thought by thought, in other words your body, that is, what appears as your body is at your mercy, which means, at the mercy of your thought. You can move the body as you like, for you can move naturally thought by thought. So what is needed is a withdrawal of the mind into its thought-stuff and to control it, make use of it from that centre. I have shown you how one can be this inner motive-thought and not obsessed by its apparent so-called material formulation. It is difficult to understand but by practice as I have shown you, you will understand."

A few days passed, thereupon Shobhanaka was practising the new technique and was on the way towards success. The Elder-one came another day and said to the group of the three or four aspirant-birds, "My mission is ended, I have taught you what was intended to be taught and you are a fair way towards success: A last word you must remember, your achievements are not for yourselves alone but you must go back and try to instill these new virtues into you comrades left behind, they too must share the joy and the glory of this new life. I

 

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have to go; for there are tasks still to be done by me and other and higher dimensions of real living. But help will always come to you; whether I come or another one comes, you will always be companioned by happy helpers." So saying this Elder-bird flew up and up and gradually turned into a blazing point and disappeared among the stars.

Now these transmuted sea-gulls met and consulted together. They were required to go back in the midst of their old comrades but how could they? Naturally they could not go back to the old mode of life. Besides, they would not be accepted by their old community. They were ostracised and they were now an outcaste group. If they ventured into the society of their old comrades they would likely be violently dealt with or perhaps even killed. However, there was no option left, they were ordained and it was now their duty to go back and try to get in touch with their old friends and influence them, guide them in the new mode of life to whatever extent it was possible.

So they flew back to their old domain and as soon as they were in sight of their former friends, all these almost in a body rushed out and raised a hue and cry, sounded an alarm as it were: "the enemies are come!" But these new beings, a new type of sea-gulls, were not daunted, they approached bravely and calmly without fear, without any intention of opposing or giving battle. They passed by over their ancient habitat sailing in a beautiful formation with their beautiful white, all-white bodies aglow with a new radiance, pulsating with a new charm. All who rushed out to engage in a fight and combat, full of anger and fury, halted, stood agape in confusion and wonder.

Thus, the battle was won, marvellously, peacefully. The older race, specially the younger generation, could remark and appreciate the gait and the manner of flight in these newcomers. They now found out that the old mode of life was not interesting enough, there was no special joy in flying to procure only food-stuff, in merely catching fishes and gobbling them up: doing that eternally, repeating over and over again the same dull routine. Instead, there was the joy in flying simply (or the sake of flying, in flying far, far into the distant horizon, far into the infinite spaces overhead into the unfamiliar and the unknown. Thus slowly the old community began to change

 

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its mode of life adding a new meaning to their movements – a new limb and direction to their body and existence.

This healthy influence became more effective since they witnessed a strange and curious event happening in their presence.

A demonstration was being given by Shobhanaka of the art of flying, of all the difficult and artistic modes of flying. He was showing the speed with which one is capable of flying, literally lightning speed. A large crowd of spectators had gathered around an arena-like opening and was intently observing all the wonderful and almost impossible acrobatics and calisthenics. They suddenly saw the bird from one far corner of the sky speeding across to the other end and, as I said, beating lightning's speed, but suddenly one stray bird happened to be there up directly in the way of the speeding bird. So in order to avoid dashing against the intruder, Shobhanaka swerved around but hurled itself straight upon... Oh! what horror! a cry of pity and pain rose up from the crowd – in swerving away from the bird on his path Shobhanaka in his incredible speed dashed and crashed against a cliff that was blocking the sides. Everyone thought, that was the end of the poor flying expert, he must have been reduced to mere pulp now. But no, what a miracle! Hale and hearty he was there flying up slowly and at ease, then gracefully descending upon the earth as if nothing had happened. Well, his body did not seem to be made of flesh and bone but of some ethereal substance, so supple, so elastic, so resilient that nothing offered any resistance to it. It could pass through like a beam of the invisible light.

The upshot was that the old community gradually changed its habits slowly but inevitably, they took to adventure and  far-flights, over the unknown waves into the infinite blue. Many became experts and given to this new life they formed gradually a community by themselves and found for themselves another habitat nearby. Those old experts, Shobhanaka's group, the masters, were with them as teachers and guides. And thus new guides and new teachers arose and community after community leading this new life, a life in which the old and unclean habits were eliminated and there was a life of exquisite beauty and harmony among all.

Here ends my story. It is the story, rather a vision and aspiration

in a beautiful symbol of a pilot, ¹ a real pilot who was flying real aeroplanes. When he flew with his hard mechanical rigid mechanical wings into other regions free from earth's gravitational control, he imagined or aspired to fly with other wings, golden wings, into other regions, golden regions of another kind of consciousness, supra-human consciousness.

The symbol used here is very appropriate and meaningful. The sea-gull has normally a very beautiful appearance: Its snow-white body, out-spread wings, all spotless white and its gracefulness in flight is indeed a delightful spectacle for the eyes to contemplate. Even so man also, even this earthly creature has within him a beautiful being snow-white in its purity and exceedingly graceful in gait and movement; that being has to be brought out and displayed even as the sea-gull transformed itself – transformed its very nature and substance into a vibrating mass of light with its diamond sheen, its material body itself a packet of intense and yet controlled radiating energy.

 

¹ A re-creation of the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, published by Turnstone Press Ltd, London, 1972.

 

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The Mother, Human and Divine

 

IN our human frailty we regard the Divine Mother as mother only, forgetting that she is also divine. We are apt to seize ex­clusively the last term of the great Name and ignore the other term which is equally important. We demand from her the same reactions of motherly love as we expect from a human mother. Our love for her is human, human in the ignorant way – full of passion and craving, hunger for appropriation, considering her as nothing else than food for our egoistic desires.

She is the mother indeed, but the Divine Mother. She wishes us to come to her in the divine way and not in the human way. For it is in the divine way that we rise to our highest and deepest stature and receive her fully and integrally, enjoy the plenitude of the delight in her Grace. A human way ties us down to the littlenesses and smallnesses of the human feeling. The human approach is more often than not that of a spoilt child. If there is one drop of true love at the bottom of the heart, the amount of ignorance and turbidity in which that is sunk is colossal. The dirt smears us and is cast upon the object of our love too.

And yet she is the mother in being the Divine. She is divine not in the sense that she is afar and aloof, cold and indifferent like the transcendent Brahman. Indeed, the Divine Mother is more motherly than the human mother can be. The human mother is only a faint echo, a far-off shadow, at times a travesty of the true Mother in the archetypal world.

The Divine Mother even in being transcendent leans down to our human dimensions, becomes one of us, is within us as our own self and with us as comrade and guide. She takes us by the hand, and if we only allow it, teaches us how to transcend

 

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the little humanity we are made of and grow into her own nature and substance through the miracle of her love – if our love responds to it adequately.

It is only by remembering her twofold truth, the two arms of her love with which she enfolds us and cherishes us that we can hope to be her true children.

 

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THE Mother's body belonged to the old creation. It was meant to be the pedestal of the New Body. It served its purpose well. The New Body will come.

This is a test, how far we are faithful to Her, true to Her Consciousness.

The revival of the body would have meant revival of the old troubles in the body. The body troubles were eliminated so far as could be done while in the body – farther was not possible. For a new mutation, a new procedure was needed. "Death" was the first stage in that process.

 

(2)

 

Sweet Mother,

Your physical body belonged to the old creation because you wanted to be one with your children. You wanted this body to uphold the New Body you were building upon it, and it gave you the service you asked of it. You will come with your New Body.

Your children's, the world's call and aspiration, love and consecration are laid at your feet in gratitude.

 

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Question:

    IT is written in A Practical Guide to Integral Yoga¹:

 

The physical nearness to the Mother is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on the physical plane. Transformation of the physical and external being is not possible otherwise.

 

My question is: How are we to interpret these words in the light of the Mother's recent passing? Does this mean that a full transformation is no longer possible to the aspirant? Or has discipleship on the material level in the path of the Integral Yoga come to an end?

 

Answer:

    Obviously, the immediate programme of a physical transformation is postponed – not cancelled.

But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical which is as living and tangible as her physical body even though not as concrete. In one of her last Notes2 she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented to her vision. That body she has built up in her long arduous labours, built up in a complete form and left with us and with humanity.

    This new body of hers, prepared behind the material curtain, she sought to infuse into the material form, even press into it or

   

¹ Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1970, p. 179.

² Notes on the Way: Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education – August 1972 (Notes on 25-3-72).

 

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force into it this new element; but Matter and man's physical nature were not yet ready: Earth still considered it as an intrusion, as something foreign. The material casing broke down in consequence – perhaps not broke down, rather broke through: but that must be another story.

But it is there living and glorious in its beauty and power and is still at work within us, and around us in the world, incessantly, towards the final consummation of its material embodiment.

What is expected of us is to see this golden Mother within us and try to become, as she always wanted, her golden children, within and without.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of an inner mind, an inner vital, an inner physical. Only the other day the passage was read out at the playground-meditation.³ The golden body, the new body, is formed out of an inner mind, an inner vital and an inner physical, renewed and reshaped. We can show our love for her, requite the debt that we owe to her Grace by admitting her Presence into our physical being and allowing her to do the work she has undertaken to do.

 

(2)

 

For us now it is time to make amends for the lapses of the past – there were lapses, indeed, grievous lapses. So long her physical body was our protection; we did not suffer the full consequences of our Karma because her body acted as buffer: it broke the force of the impact of the karma and reduced its evil effects to a minimum. Her body bore our burden and relieved us of the misery otherwise due to us. Mankind, the the world even, does not know the saving Grace that her material frame brought to them They would have gone down to destruction and dissolution but for the presence of the Divine Body.

The world has survived, mankind has an assured future, that is the work done by her body. It aimed at a little more, to show us something of the concrete form of the future, but evidently that was not to be, because something from us also,

 

³ Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Toga, Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 22, pp. 307-8.

 

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from the world and mankind, some helping hand in the labour was needed – we remember her ringing words: Si l’humanité consentait à être spiritualisée – well, that is the minimum, that minimum was also not granted to her body. Her body was made so easily available to all without any trouble and effort on our part that we lost all sense of the precious things brought to us, brought to our very door. We did not know how to make use of it and have the true benefit out of it. Many a time she did say something to us to that effect regretfully, we wasted a treasure like the pampered prodigal son.

It is regrettable but she has left no cause for our regret She has left with us the true source of her protective power, her living Consciousness concretised in the earth's atmosphere, in the personal atmosphere of each one of us. We have only to open our grateful eyes and see it. The ladder has been taken away, but she has come nearer to us and a little uplift will replace us within her arms.

Since we have no longer the support of her body on which we depended almost exclusively, we are compelled to seek the true support, the support of her, consciousness, the inner reality – her inner presence, her living Person within – which her body represented, whose acquaintance we were not careful enough to cultivate. Now we are thrown upon the only alternative available. The way will be arduous; we could have much more easily mounted up the ladder of consciousness with the aid of her body, almost playfully like children. Now a little bit of austerity will be needed to go on our own, the austerity will be needed to bring our external life and physical consciousness in line with her own consciousness, to prepare them, to make them ready. Her material body offered an unconditional help and protection, now all that will be conditional – conditional upon our willing co-operation, our happy and conscious collaboration – of course the Grace will be always there. Once she asked us point-blank, for the crisis was upon us – Are you ready? Almost unthinkingly, in a gesture of bravado and gallantry, many answered "yes, we are." But we were not in fact.

    The task then for us and for the world is to make ourselves ready, that is to say, make our physical being and consciousness

 

 "If only mankind consented to be spiritualised."

 

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free of the old reactions, instilling into them the consciousness that she is, with which she still embraces us – so that when the next call comes, although the call is always there, we may answer with truth on our lips – "We are ready."

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The Mother Abides

 

the human race which means a large or a significant part of it, the effort has had to be directed to that end. The level of the human consciousness has to be lifted up to an extent that it might be capable of holding and embodying the inflatus that was coming into it for the change. Otherwise an individual representing the human level and forming part of the material consciousness would not be able to do it. Not only the earth consciousness but the material constitution of the earth has to be transfigured  For the human body to pass through and complete the stages of transformation must have parallel echoes in other individuals – not necessarily the whole of humanity, but as I said, presumably a sizeable part of it. Otherwise the purpose of the change, a global, collective change will not be fulfilled. An isolated individual supramentalised body upon earth would be a freak of Nature, a forced miracle as it were, an anomalous object in Nature, and a humanity even at its topmost rung would not find any relation or kinship with it.

 So, the earth-nature has to be prepared for that end in view, first of all the earth-consciousness in the physical substance and then the raw substance itself. This has to be done as our immediate and urgent business of life.

 

(2)

 

I said the earth-consciousness was not quite ready yet for the final transformation of the Mother's body, that is to say, the material substance of the body. Therefore it could not accommodate the incoming transforming force – and it broke: in breaking it must have broken through, through the hard dense outermost crust of matter – with what results, time will show.

As for us who survive, let us begin from the beginning. Let us start from a scratch as it were. We remember Mother's, own story, what she had done for herself when she came to Sri Aurobindo. She effaced altogether her old personality, her achievements and accomplishments, made a clean slate of her consciousness and laid herself at the feet of Sri Aurobindo like a new-born babe, innocent of the past. Let us also in the same way face the day with our baby-soul in front, for that little being is the Mother's Presence in us, still aglow with her consciousness.

 

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(3)

 

"You know, I was very hesitant to read this to you.

In one way it is all right, but because. . . .

In fact it is a mental and intellectual presentation of a phenomenon which goes beyond all intellectual and mental measure. This phenomenon is not only extra-intellectual, supramental but also supra-cosmic, the sense and bearing of which will be unveiled in the course of time.

Meanwhile, I think the best thing to do would be to remain quiet with a serene trust, with all the aspiration of our soul, our soul which is the concrete presence of Mother Herself in us which we carry within us always."¹

 

¹ This comment was made in French as it was a French class; the original in French is given below:

J'ai beaucoup hésité, n'est-ce pas, de vous lire ça.

D'un coté c'estbien, mais parce que....

En fait c'est une présentation mentale et intellectuelle d'un phénomene qui

dépasse toute proportion mentaIe et intellectuelle. Ce phénomène est non seulement extra-intellectuel, supra-mental mais aussi supra-cosmique dont Ie gens et la portee se dévoilera au cours du temps.

En attendant je craig Ie mieu'x serait de rester tranquille avec une confiance seraine, avec toute l'aspiration de nacre âme, l'âme qui est la présence concrète de Mère Elle-même en nous que nous portons toujours.

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Twin Prayers

 

Lord, this morning Thou hast given me the assurance that Thou wouldst stay with us until Thy work is achieved, not only as a consciousness which guides and illumines but also as a dynamic Presence in action. In unmistakable terms Thou hast promised that all of Thyself would remain here and not leave the earth-atmosphere until earth is transformed. Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work.

 

THE Mother's prayer to Sri Aurobindo – so beautiful, so poignant and so true – we, her children, now turn round and readdress to Her own sweet self. .

The new creation that the Mother embodied is not lost, it is not wiped out with the disappearance of the material body. It has been a true creation and is indelibly implanted in the earth-atmosphere and will remain there for eternity. And it is not merely a static structure, it is a living and growing entity. It is not in the earth's atmosphere a mere image or a lifeless picture transfixed there as on a canvas strip. It is living and growing – living and growing not only in itself and for itself, but making its habitat the atmosphere also live and grow in new dimensions, that is to say, transforming it in accordance with its own developing truth and reality. It is growing and characteristically growing downwards, that is to say, extending itself more and more towards an earthly manifestation or incarnation. It is like the ashwattha tree spoken of by the rishis of old that stands upside down, the roots upward and the branches spreading out downwards – indeed it is growing downward – drawing its life-

 

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sap from above. The physical embodiment, the materialisation of the inner formation will happen in course of time inevitably. It will touch the ground, the very ground of the earth and stand as its marvel-creation – through a process of calamities and catastrophes perhaps – which may indeed be minimised if circumstances permit and the Grace admits; but however the process, the end is decreed, for the decree is that of the Divine and it is the destiny of earth-consciousness.

 

(2)

 

This is however the Mother's part of the work and she is doing it perfectly, on her side. But what about ourselves? What is our share of the work? For it is intended that we, her children, should be collaborators in her work, so that we too may be integrated into the Divine realisation. The Mother herself has indicated the line of service we can render to her in the communication I just read out to you:

 

. . . henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfilment of Thy sublime Work.

 

The situation has somewhat changed since then and has become more difficult. On the departure of Sri Aurobindo, sometime after, Mother gave us a message, an admonition, pointing to us the difficulty:

 

Pour suivre Sri Aurobindo dans la grande aventure de son yoga intégral, il fallait toujours être guerrier; mais maintenant qu'il nous a quitté physiquiment, il faut être un héro.

 

To follow Sri Aurobindo in the great adventure of his integral yoga, one needed always to be a warrior; but now that he has physically left us, one needs to be a hero.

24-11-1952

 

At present when the Mother too is no more there – apparently – we seem to be abandoned children, what are we to do or be? It is no longer sufficient to be a warrior, not sufficient

 

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even to be a hero. What should we be? Something greater than the hero. One must be a Yogi. The yogi is one who has the Divine Consciousness or the Mother's consciousness. If you find that it is not so easy for one to be a yogi, even if one tries sincerely, I suggest to you another alternative. It is to leap into another dimension: to be a child, a child of the Mother.

I give you this subject for meditation: on becoming. . . a child, an ideal child of the Mother.

 

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WHILE coming to you, I saw your beautiful display of excerpts and quotations from the writings of Mother and Sri Aurobindo on the walls all around. Yes, it was a beautiful picture – and the sayings and mottoes and lines of poetry were, needless to say, precious treasures dear to us. But – left at that, to see, admire and pass on, well – they are dead things – words, words, words – lifeless skeletons. They have a meaning and they serve their purpose only when you come in contact with the life and consciousness in them, when you live them with your own life and be the consciousness that is there.

You know the well-known phrase: the letter kills, the spirit saves. Without the spirit, the word is only a dead shell, even a mantra is a dead thing – a mere jumble of sounds if it is not enkindled, enlivened with the spirit. Now I say you are to breathe your own spirit into the apparently dead or lifeless forms. For children are nothing but spirit: spirit means new consciousness, living light, it is not a tall claim I make on your behalf. I will explain.

You children who are here, who have been here for sometime, are a privileged class of human beings. You do not know it but you will know one day. You must have seen the Mother, many perhaps had her physical touch, while there are others who continue to breathe in the atmosphere where her body still endures. You have within you the rare thing hardly found elsewhere, the spark of which I was speaking – it is a particle of the Mother's own consciousness, her own life and her own subtle body-consciousness. You have imbibed it in you with your breath and are still imbibing.

 

¹ A talk to young children given on 12 August 1974.  

 

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It is there, you have to be, conscious of it and realise the full benefit out of it. You are to be the living, not merely echoes and imprints but embodiments of the Word of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. You are now only an embryo, a rudimentary particle of the new life – but it is there – you have in you the thing needed essentially – I only remind you to make you conscious of it. Even as you have budding gymnasts and an athlete among you, the playground makes you conscious of it, offers you the opportunity to cultivate and develop and bring it to fruition.

Now in a general way children all over the world are a privileged class. They possess what old age, even mature age does not possess or has lost. I mention two essential qualities pre-eminently belonging to the green age or to the "salad days": Happiness – a child is ever happy – in spite of its occasional weepings and wailings – and happiness means a radiant smile. To the old people I have often said, "Always smile. Mother has taught us how to smile in all circumstances." Well, that is the natural gift of the young. A smile makes your life's journey smooth. In no other way can you remove so successfully the obstacles that beset you. And also that is the lever to lift up your consciousness – it has a mysterious power that automatically relieves you of much of the burden of life, lightens you and leads you into a higher sphere. For smile is a divine quality. Next to Happiness, the natural virtue of a child-consciousness is Freedom. It does not find any barrier anywhere, it can do anything.

These two characteristic virtues of childhood themselves spring from another fundamental quality of young nature – simplicity, a spontaneous outflow of energy without any thinking of before or after – none of mind's complexities and hesitations.

In this sphere too, we have here for the play of these natural youthful qualities opportunities and advantages that are not easily available elsewhere. The atmosphere of freedom that we enjoy is incomparable – Mother herself told us once.

As you grow, you must carry with you these fundamental qualities and you will remain ever young.

Now, to carry over – that is the trouble. And that problem Mother has solved for us here. This is what I was telling you just now – the special privilege that we enjoy here, granted to

 

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those who are here. Added to the fundamental natural virtues of youthfulness, we have been given a supplementary boon, that of consciousness, Mother's own consciousness. It is this additional element that has given a special turn and temper in the atmosphere here and has brought about a change not only in the degree but in the kind of the ordinary youthful qualities. I am speaking of your soul-consciousness. I say you may not know it or recognise it by your mind and intellect, but it is there. And I say also, you will never lose it, whatever happens to your outer life. That will lead you ultimately to the Supreme Realisation, Immortal Life on Earth. It may be clouded for the outer mind, but it is always there behind.

Exactly so, I come back to the point from where I started. The mottoes – the writings displayed on the wall – are also to be displayed as living entities in your being – in your consciousness, and in your life, even in your body. That is the better part of your work – indeed, the essential part.

Today a new consciousness is abroad. The earth-atmosphere is filled with the new spirit. But here the Mother has left with us not merely her consciousness but a conscious being – a part of her living personality in us, that is the divine legacy we enjoy. We must not simply be proud of it but try to prove ourselves worthy of it. The Divine Personality will grow everywhere but the path-finders, forerunners are among you.

Naturally there will be formations of the new life in all climes and countries, but the patterns, the norms will have been set by you for the Mother was here in her physical material body.

So the Mantras you declare as divine words, you must make them living powers, gods themselves embodied in you. The basis is here: the Mother has laid the foundations here for her creation – the roots from where the shoots and branches are to emerge and spread out abroad and everywhere. In any case, here or elsewhere, as the Mother has announced in her own voice:

Built is the golden tower, the flame-child born.

 

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THE pressure from above has been withdrawn and normalcy restored to the earth-consciousness.

 Pressure meant a separation: something foreign acting from elsewhere, an interference. As a process, a passage needed for a time, for a special purpose and under special circumstances, it was necessary and welcome. But circumstances have changed.

The higher consciousness is not to remain always high but become level with the normal. Either the higher must come down and mingle totally with the lower or the lower has to rise and merge altogether into the higher, or both meet and unite midway somewhere.

Earth or material nature does not easily tolerate any thing unknown and foreign to it. Even if it is for its own well-being, a foreign touch makes it shrink and turn on itself. It is even painful for it to bear. In the end the earth is not to be goaded on or driven along: it has to go on its own. It must depend entirely on itself, bring out what it carries within itself or has acquired or stored. It has to outgrow its childhood or apprenticeship, the period when an intelligent amount of pressure or even coercion might be needed or inevitable. But that stage passed, the higher realisation is to be the natural expression of ordinary earth-life: its normal state is to be the state of the higher consciousness, its life naturally moved by its self-nature expressing its own truth.

 If there is to be a Divine destiny for earth, it must be because of its free choice. There must be no pressure or even solicitude from any agent outside itself to compel it or force it that way. It must be a glad and spontaneous impulse from within to follow the line of destiny it has itself chosen.

As the original birth of Ignorance was a free choice of

 

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Ignorance, even so the return of Ignorance to consciousness is to be a matter of spontaneous self-seeking. It may be true or it is true in a deeper way that a mortal is chosen whom the Divine has already chosen, but that is another matter. Here upon earth we, mortal souls, are free agents, we choose or we do not choose.

In any case if one is to possess truly something one must acquire it by one's exertion and in one's complete liberty. A free gift or an imposition even of a precious object is always something foreign and unnatural to it. One must learn to love a thing in order to have it wholly for oneself, it must be made part and parcel of one's being. And true love can exist only in free choice.

Latterly the Mother was saying whenever the question of the descent of supermind was raised that there was no descent any longer: for, the thing has descended and it is here, it is no more a question of descent, that is to say, something arriving from elsewhere that was not here before. At present it is simply the question of manifestation of the thing that is with us and among us.

At one time Mother was asking for, even pleading for collaboration from the material nature. It was accorded in principle but in act it was found wanting. Now the tables are turned. The earth-consciousness has now to ask for, pray for collaboration from the Divine. The material consciousness has to come forward and take the lead and play the frontal role in the working out of the evolution. The collaboration of her physical body has been withdrawn, in order to leave us free in our physical movements so that we may learn to labour and labour in full freedom for the service expected of us. We say she has withdrawn herself, that is to say, in her physical body, but she is still there, and her being there, her very existence is force, a helping force and that is collaboration enough and is always at our disposal.

Now at present it all depends how much the earth consciousness has received, imbibed or assimilated of the Divine Presence. That will be the measure of the fulfilment human being can achieve. As much as we earth-creatures feel and express of the higher reality, that much we shall. become truly and divinely. If we continue to be the old stock with no or

 

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little change, well, we shall have to wait perhaps for another million years.

It would mean for us naturally a change of dress for good many a time perhaps. There seems to be no other way. But a change of dress is inevitable and should be welcome, for kept on too long it would stink. A dip in the Vaitarni or Acheron (if we happen to be in Greece) would be wholesome. There is however always the possibility of a miracle happening: to this Mother was referring very often. In that case you might learn to change, to renew yourselves in the inner way, even like the Vedic cows: as the Rishi says – Paliknirid yuvatayo bhavanti – even those of them who were grey with age, became young again.¹

Naturally it does not matter at all to the Divine, the supreme consciousness – the whole eternity is his play-field, a million years this side or that do not count for Him anything. 

And yet, we are human beings and we can have other vistas equally divine.

The Mother became a human being like us as totally as possible for that purpose, to shorten the million years.

             

The Mother continues to do what is necessary under the circumstances and perhaps more, she has not stopped her work. But the most crucial thing and the most critical – turning the corner – has been done. Sri Aurobindo has spoken of it in memorable words-we know the passage in The Mother – I quote the lines and conclude:

The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe. Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and. has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance. But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the

 

¹ Rigveda, V, 2.4.

 

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Falsehood and error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy of he sublime Ananda. In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, borne to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life. This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of

Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.¹

 

¹ Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, Vol. 25, p. 24-25

 

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I WILL tell you a story today, but of another kind. I will tell you of a dream, or a vision that I had sometime ago. It was an ashram, I say an ashram for it was not quite like our ashram although there was a great similarity between the two. In some respects it was like our ashram and in other respects somewhat unlike. First of all the whole ashram was in one place, a consolidated organisation, not houses here and there scattered about: there were no buildings or houses belonging to other people or other organisations, also the buildings were beautiful to look at and the general lay-out artistic, but all the activities we have were there. The school was there, the playground was there, the library also, but all in an orderly arrangement. The Mother was also there, she was going from place to place, observing all and speaking to people. Among the people, curiously, some I seemed to recognise, some of those even who are here now, there were many strangers from other countries, a good many of them. Regarding those who are here now and whom I seemed to recognise there also, the impression is rather vague and I cannot name them. But some of those who were here and passed away I recognised very well, they had almost the same face and features – but in a new, fresh and younger form. They were active and handsome young men, young women – I remember Sri Aurobindo quoting from the Rigveda: The Vedic Rishi speaks of a happy herd of cows grazing in green fields; the Rishi adds: even those among them that were old have become young now. The cow represented for the Rishi the light, the sun's ray, the purity of consciousness. Perhaps the image came from the actual life of the Rishis of that time, the cattle they reared, the domestic animals about them, the natural scenery around them, and all that was an important

 

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part of their ordinary daily life. A whole herd of cattle all white is a beautiful picture. Even so there was something in the atmosphere of the ashram which gave it a special quality, it was clear pure, limpid and transparent, there was a strange luminosity in it, and it was a very happy atmosphere. While you are there, you feel free and at ease and there were no petty feelings that we have here in the normal life of the world, no anger, no jealousy, no selfishness, no ugliness: there was a happy coordination of all persons and things.

My feeling is that this ashram that I saw was in fact the inner reality of our ashram here, that inner ashram which is within us all; what we see at present is the outer form, the material form which is a good deal deformed and even falsified in many ways. Indeed that inner ashram has an other worldly atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere of rarified heights. I have told you very often that those who are here are fortunate, they breathe this atmosphere and in spite of their faults and foibles, and no matter what they do, they are in contact with something of the inner beauty and fragrance. I do not know whether you have heard what Mother said more than once, that all the children here, when they live here for sometime, imbibe and carry a new atmosphere. And she could recognise a person from a distance, even from a great distance, not by his face or physical features but by the atmosphere he carried that he belonged to the ashram, very different from the atmosphere an outsider normally carries. It is an atmosphere or aura made of happiness and purity and luminosity. All the ashram children are surrounded by it because it is Mother's own atmosphere. Therefore in these days, she used to say, these children should not go out into the outside world even in their holidays, because, when they go out, she said, she had seen it, they lose this ashram atmosphere and when they come back, they are coated with a thick layer of the mud of the ordinary world, and it took her a lot of time and trouble to rub and scrub and clean the dross upon the body, to made it shine as before. You may remember here in this connection a Rama-krishna story about the sinners who went to the Ganges for a bath to purify themselves; they leave their sins on the shore or the sins leave them as they get into the Ganges water, but the sins wait for them there on the bank and as soon as they come

 

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back purified of their sins, the sins lying in wait jump on them again and the sinners remain always sinners. Here naturally you are not destined to remain sinners always.

However, that atmosphere, the inner atmosphere still exists here. With the Mother's withdrawal of physical body that too might have withdrawn a little perhaps, a little only, just a few inches perhaps! But it is still there, for the Mother is there as concrete as before although not as material.. As I said, there are some who have passed away from here and some new faces also I found in this other inner ashram. These are already there wholly in that ashram. But we who are here, we lead a double life as it were: part of us is here, and part in that other inner ashram, as though one leg this side and the other on that side over the fence. In your better moments when you feel nice and free, when you are happy, when you are noble in spirit, you come in contact with that inner ashram, you breathe that atmosphere. In dreams also, while asleep, apparently asleep, many of you must have seen the Mother, must have had Sri Aurobindo's darshan. That is because you come in contact with that inner atmosphere and enter into it. Now our task is to come more and more in contact with that reality even in our waking moments, to be conscious of that which is nothing but the Mother's Presence. Half of you, your inner life is already there, bathing there in that luminous happy air. Only try to be conscious of that: if you are conscious of it even a little you will feel immensely happy, feel that you are beautiful, that you are wise – when you feel the touch of that inner ashram life. And instead of living entirely or mainly the outer life of the ashram as at present you can turn this life into that inner life; and gradually reshape the present life in the mould of the inner life. That is your duty, your task, particularly you who are students, boys and girls, that is your central work – study and learning and all that is secondary. What you should do and what you can is to breathe a new air, live in a better, more beautiful way. You can have this inner life, that is already there, this inner life not with much difficulty, for it is already there, a collective inner life, which is so beautiful as I say, filled with the fragrance of the Mother's Presence. It is a collective life in which you all are not only brothers and sisters but one body and soul unified in the Mother's loving and living substance.

 

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That inner life you have to bring out into your body and all the external activities. It is however the very nature of that inner organisation to express itself outwardJy, its spontaneous drive is towards expression and embodiment, even if you do not know or perceive it, it is slowly coming forward. Only if you are conscious, if you help, collaborate, you will be benefited, you will grow in consciousness, attain a new stature, you will enjoy the supreme happiness of a miraculous achievement.

At present, as I say, there is a separation between the two ashrams, these two worlds or lives. They run parallel to each other or oftener, intertwined, intermixed, badly dove-tailed. They are to be made one single existence: the inner must take up, assimilate into itself the outer, the outer must allow itself to be cleansed and emptied of its dross and be possessed altogether by the inner. They are to form one, as it is said, streamlined entity: one being, one life, one body.

I said your work is to try to be conscious and take part more and more in the inner life. Naturally you ask how to do it. Actually there is no precise process, no hard and fast rule for learning or acquiring it. It is not like learning a mathematical problem or even a particular physical exercise which you learn by habit and culture. It is nothing mechanical. It is a natural growth. It comes automatically and spontaneously, shows itself to you and in you. You have simply to ask for it sincerely, go on asking for it as intensely as possible, repeat as a mantra: "I want to be there, I want to be there, I want to be there." That is quite sufficient. That will evoke in you the new light, the new impulse that will lead you on. That is the child's call to the Mother and the Mother always responds-with her Light and Life and Love.

You have been told, and I have also often told you, that although the Mother's physical body is not there, she has left her consciousness with us: the consciousness is still living, it is still working. She herself said even while she was in her body that if ever she left her body, her consciousness will be always there with us. But I will add something more here. Apart from the consciousness what she has left with us, what remains with us, is her Love, the love for her children is still there undiminished as before in its fullness. I spoke of the inner ashram life: that life is built out of her love for her children, and it must be

 

Page 108

easy for you to enter and enjoy that life through your love for  the Mother, your answering love for the Mother's love for you. And through the glow of that love you will gradually develop into what she wanted you to become.

 

Page 109

 

IN her “Prayers and Meditations” (Prières et Méditations) Mother wrote under the date 25 September 1914:

 

A new light will break upon the earth,

A new world will be born,

And the things promised will be fulfilled.¹

 

Subesquently, that is to say, after a lapse of more than forty years, under the date 29 February – 29 March 1956, she intro­duced a change in the statement, in respect of the tense used. She re-wrote it in this' form:

 

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is be born,

The things that were promised are fulfilled.²

 

The change was needed because of the change in the situa­tion. There has been a radical change in the actualities of the situation. Mother herself explains in another message com­municated after about a month under the date 24 April 1956:

 

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise, but a living fact, a reality. It is at work here and one day will come when the

 

 

¹  Une lumière nouvelle poindra sur la terre.

     Un monde nouveau naîtra,

   Et les chases promises seront accomplis.

 ² Une lumière nouvelle poinds sur la terre.

   Un monde nouveau est né, .

   Et les chases promises sont accomplis.

 

Page 110

most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.¹

 

She speaks repeatedly of her vision and declares most em­phatically that the new world is born, born, born – as it were, thrice born (il est né, né, né,). It is there behind, it is moving, threading past all the obscurities that hide it but in a manner indomitable and invincible: the outer weight of ignorance cannot hold it down eternally.

Progress continues, the Mother declares under the date 3 February 1958, that is to say, after the lapse of about two years-a momentous declaration, the arrival of a full-fledged supramental boat at the shore of earth. Its mission was to carry within it human beings who were ready for the supra­mental life. The description of the whole scene was so beautiful, so graphic, so alluring that on reading it a young girl from outside wrote to the Mother that she would like to be a passenger on the boat and prayed to the Mother for admission. Mother explains that the substance of which this new world was made was the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest to the physical world, its first manifestation.

Once again she reaffirms the reality of her vision in the message she gave to her children on the New Year Day of 1961:

This wonderful world of delight waiting at our gates for our call, to come down upon earth. . . .²

 

Naturally, this is not the end, the culmination. One step has still to be taken – the material matter too has to be touched and remoulded – and that means a hiatus, a time-lag in the end. The process of creation always follows this line, a thing to be created or embodied upon earth is first created in a subtle

 

 

¹ La manifestation du Supramental sur la terre n'est plus seulement une promesse, mais un fait vivant, une réaIité.

   II est à l'oeuvre maintenant, ici-bas, et un jour viendra ou Ie plus aveugle, Ie plus inconscient, même Ie plus volontairement ignorant sera obligé de Ie re­connaître.

 ² Ce monde merveilleux de felicité,

   à nos partes,

   qui attend notre appel

   pour descendre sur Ia terre.

 

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world. When it is ready, ready-made in that world, then it precipitates itself upon the material world, slowly or gradually or suddenly according to the cosmic will. An illustration to explain the point, the Mother herself gives it.

Once, asked about the liberation of India, sometime in 1915 when India was completely in bondage, she answered without the least hesitation: "India is free". She did not say "India will be free", she said simply "India is free" as though stating an actual fact. The physical fact however came about in the year 1947, that is to say, 32 years after the thing happened in the subtle world. Mother comments that is the exact image of the resistance to the manifestation, the physical realisation.

Not merely creation, but destruction also happens in the same way. The destruction first occurs in the subtle world and as a consequence inevitably takes place the physical destruc­tion. Sri Krishna in the Gita tells Arjuna: All these troops ranged against you have already been killed by me, you have only to be just the instrument or the excuse: Mayaîvaîté nihatah purvameva.

                         

Savitri is coming back to earth to her normal life. She has done her final conquest. And the whole world of the new conquest, the embodied Life Divine within her, she enters the earth-life, but with the veil drawn upon herself and her achieve­ment. The 'one day more' is yet to be done, the 'one day' made of material matter. She is not to disclose herself till that one day is done. The curtain is down now but behind lies the whole edifice she has built up, in its entire unflawed beauty and fulfil­ment. At present outwardly we see before us the arena of a gray dangerous world, as of old. The curtain will surely roll up and reveal what it hides, slowly or perhaps a shell may burst open all on a sudden and bring forth the new life full and entire. . . How will it happen... the Revelation, the Epiphany? The event will show. In the meantime, the New Creation, a "greater dawn" she holds within herself.

 

Deep guarded by her mystic folds of light.

 

Page 112

FRENCH

 

---

 

AVE MATER

 

Amor  mi mosse che mi fa parlare . . .       

                              -Dante

 

Et je devins poète en étant amoureux . . .           

                                    -Corneille

 

Page 114

Mater Dolorosa

 

I

Je songe aux belles nuits, aux rêves diaphanes

Où j'ai vécu jadis; je vois encore leg traits

Fugitifs d'un pays aux horizon discrets,

Les regrets d'une gloire ultime qui se fane!

 

Loin des noirs tourbillons de ce monde profane,

Mon âme reposait aux calmes diaprés

Des azurs infinis, et tranquille, s'ouvrait

Aux baisers innocents qu'en d'autres cieux on gla,ne!

 

 

Le voile tenebreux, hélas! monte toujours

Des gouffres inconnus et devore nos jours;

Et plus l'éclair solicit, mieux sa foudre devaste!

O reste d'une cendre au milieu de nos feux

Les plus ardents; leg gourds ramages des aveux

Secrets mal endormis dans la chaire la plus chaste!

 

II

 

Rose, couleur d'aurore, O reveil du matin!

C'est Ie calme des cieux qu'encore tu distilles;

Rose éclose à demi, fillette au sang tranquille!

C'est la paix qui me vient de ton regard divino

Tout l'arome secret que tu cèIes encore

Dans ton sein, je pourrais en goûter au besoin

Les délices – mais reste, aujourd'hui, reste au loin!

Rêve de demi-jour! Ideal que j'adore!

 

Page 115

Reste pour moi l'étoile au fond de l'infini,

La voile des lointains horizons – salvatrice,

Et que tout monde et tout désir s'évanouisse

En un pur transparent de l'Audelà béni!

 

Aujourd'hui je me plais . . . au mirage peut-être

Qu'étale un crépuscule, et j'attends des serments

Plus ardents, qu'au grand jour du désenchantement

Je te ferai demain, rose d'un amour traitre!

 

Je saurai te baigner d'un intime océan

Tout de sève empourpré, t'échauffer à la flamme

De roes desirs montants, corp mortel oû se pâme

Et meurt un ange, ô chair qui fleurit Ie néant!

 

III

 

La clarte de la lune est tendre et toute molle:

Elle dort sur leg monts, elle dart sur les mers,

Elle souffle à l'étoile un deux trouble de chair. . .

O leg fines langueurs d'une âme frêle et folle!

 

La lueur du soleil dissipe Ie beau rêve;

Mais un autre s'éveille au sein du jour brulant

De gloire vehemente et d'empire sanglant…

Vanité d'un moment, bruit du flat sur la grève!

 

Ni Lune ni Soleil brillent dans mon âme;

Toute une autre Lumière a su ravir roes cieux…

Puissante est la douceur, aussi douce la flame

Que me verse un lointain regard mysterieux!

 

IV

 

Quand je vois de sa tige alanguie une feuille

Qui tombe frissonant aux caprices du vent,

Quand je vois la paupière humide d'un enfant

Qui n'a plus son jouet – je gens que la s'effeuille

 

Tout un rêve blemi, que c'est la Vanité

Qu'y pleure assise au bard de nos mortalités!

Page 116

---

Et cependant j'ai vu leg debris qu'amoncelle

L'ouragan en furie et toute une grandeur

Me semblait une fois d'espace supérieur

S'élancer et plonger dans leg fangs charnelles –

­Mais ces vastes douleurs, ces grandioses marts

M'embrasaient je ne sais de quels secrets transports!

 

V

On a déjà fini de se plaindre, insensé!

On a déjà fini! Viens donc, quitte la scène. . .

On a séché ses pleurs, on a déjà pansé

Les blessures – pourquoi chérir encore la peine?

On a bien survécu des rêves enfantines,

Le oeeur ne s'émeut plus de petites faiblesses;

On est calme, on est sage. . . un rire clandestine

Accueillit l'assaut de ces viles tristesses!

 

La rose d'un matin, Ie parfum d'un printemps,

Et l'amour qui capture un cerveau juvenile –

­Qu' est-ce donc qui demeure ici? Mais tu' prétends

Que ta démence à toi sera seule immobile!

 

 

En ces flots de la vie où rien s'attache à rien,

Combien de fois veux-tu qu'on se plaise aux folies?

On s'en éprend, et puis, on s'échappe, on oublie . . .

Un rideau clôt toujours nos horizons anciens!

 

VI

 

Creur d'enfant où ne sont ni l'amour ni la haine­ –

Bourgeonnette incolore, ah! dors tant qu'il fait unit.

Dors à ton aise, et loin du maude, de ses bruits

Rêve au calme, au silence, aux choses lointaines!

Lent épanouissement au rayon matinal,

O rongeur puérile aux paupieres timides!

Garde ton innocence encore, demens Ie vide

Avide qui refine en ton coeur virginal!

 

Page 117

---

Mater Gloriosa

 

I

 

J'adore la femme. . . .

C'était ma faiblesse, c'est mon salut.

Dans mon ignorance, lorsque je n'étais qu'un adolescent – en  âme et en esprit – je suivais la forme humaine du féminin et je désirais les délices terrestres qu'elle verse.

C'est l'Eternel Féminin qui m'avait tenté, qui m'avait capturé.

L'Eternel Féminin, c'est la Nescience, Ie bras sinistre du Divin.

Maintenant que je suis devenu homme, et que mon âme et mon espirit ont atteint l'âge mur, c'est encore la femme qui me tente irrésistiblement,­–

mais c'est la femme dans sa vérité plenière, dans sa réalité souveraine, et je la poursuis d'une ardeur plus vive encore qu'autrefois. . . .

Et c'est avec aisance, n'est-ce pas, que je me suis jeté droit dans Ie sein étoile de la Conscience suprême, de l'Energie créatrice, de la Mère Divine!

L'Eternal Féminin a cedé au Féminin Transcendant!

 

II

 

    La matière, n'embrasse point la matière; elles demeurent toujours à coté, et séparée l'une de l'autre.

    La chair n'enlace la chair que par Ie contour; et leg contours passent l'un autour de l'autre, mais se séparent toujours.

    La vie pénètre la vie et la Conscience; seul l'Etre se dissout dans l'Etre et tous deux ne font qu'un.

 

Page 121

Et quand l'être ainsi s'unit à l'autre, la conscience à la conscience et la vie à la vie, alors, ô mystère! la matière se dissout dans la matière et toutes deux ne font qu'un!

 

III

 

La chair n'est pas la matière seul; elle est aussi la vie, la vie concentrée et concrète.

La chair en sa vraie réalité est une fleur, une fleur qui s'est developpée, qui a évolué pour avoir un mouvement plus articulé, une substance plus consciente d'elle-même.

La chair pure et radieuse – dont peut-être l'enfant est petrié – a Ie parfum, la beauté, la vie de la fleur. Mieux encore, comme la fleur elle est un message vivant d'Audelà jeté ici-bas.

 

IV

 

La brise matinale – Ie premier rayon du soleil levant – un brin d'herbe qui se perle de la rosée.

Ton haleine, Ie souffle embaumé de l'Infini, de la Vie immortalise – Ton sourire annonciateur de la Conscience souveraine – Mon coeur qui scintille mouillé d'une goutte de ton amour divin.

 

V

           

La nuit – La flèche d'un clocher – Le ciel parsemé d'étoiles.

Des profondeurs insondables de mon âme s'élance vers toi un Désir aigu et aveugle…. et soudain s'immobilise à l'ap­proche de tant de caresses lumineuses que verse à pleines mains ta Miséricorde infinie.

 

Page 122

 

 

Devenir conscient, c'est devenir Toi-même:

Car la conscience, c'est la lumière

qui est Ta Presence.

 

Devenir Toi-même, c'est I'unique joie:

Car Tu es la Joie même.

 

"Elle est à moi" – voilà Ie moyen Ie plus sûr

            de la perdre;

"Je suis à Elle" – c'est Ie seul secret

            de La posséder.

                       

O Faible, ne cherche pas devenir fort –

Aime – I' Amour seul te sauvera:

La force n'enfante pas l'amour, mais I'amour

est toujours la force.

 

Si la foi qui transporte les montagnes te manque, ô mon

âme, ancre-toi à l' Amour – même à lamour profane. . . .

L'amour même profane pour Ie Divin se divinise toujours.

 

Page 123

 

 

"Accours, ma mie, accours! que chez nous t'emmène!"

C'est Ie Seigneur qui prie une frêle âme humaine.

 

J'ai soif d'or et d'azur, de tout ce qui s'irise

La terre est un trou nair, Ie corps une hantise.

 

La chair trahit et l'âme en pleure. . . . mais ces pleurs

Pénètrent dans la chair qui mue en feux et fleurs!

 

Fuyez ces bards où tout blesse et rien ne console,

Où l'on honit son âme et brise son idole!

 

"Où vas-tu, voyageur?" – "Mais par où tu me mènes,

O Flamme mirifique, Asile des phalènes!"

 

Ce qui se donne à Dieu demeure et se restaure,

Toute autre chose passe et fuit et s'évapore!

 

Vivre en guerrier, toujours plus dangereusement,

Se donner corps et âme, et prêt à tout moment.

 

"Viens à Moi, malheureux mortel précipité

Au tréfonds de malheur et de mortalité!"                                   

Page 124

Que je me jette en Toi, mon unique salut,

Tout comme un dard qui va droit à son but élu!

 

                                   

Ta main clémente essuie à chaque pas la trace

Unique. . . . et Ie chemin se pare de Ta Grâce!

 

                                   

Guérisseur! guéris-nous de nos peines d'antan. . . .

Tel un monde hivernal au souffle du printemps!

 

 

On est toujours en course aux pas d'un feu-follet. . . .

Mais l'ombre fuit sans cesse et l'on tombe écroulé!

                                   

Chaque soir Ie vieux jour perd son sang et sa vie. . . .

Que l'ame d'un nouveau matin s'en gait servie!

 

Toujours plus haut, encore plus près! Que la conscience

Maîtrise de la vie en Dieu la belle science!

 

 

Pour voir leg dieux, il faut tout de bon s'aveugler,

II faut être muet pour avoir leur parler!

 

 

Sois gourd, etre pétri de bruit, sois gourd, et preste,

Si tu veuilles ouir la musique celèste!

 

 

Et pour agir en dieux, en puissance cosmiques,

Sois calme comme au soir un soleil qui abdique!

 

 

La fIamme au salamandre, à l'aigle sa haute aire – ­

Le noir limon au ver. . . . à chacun son repair!

 

Page 125

 

From

Sanskrit

Bengali

French

 

Sanskrit

 

HYMN TO DAWN

 

Rishi Kutsa

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala 1, Sukta 113)

 

Lo, the supreme Light of lights is come:

            a varied knowledge is born in front spreading far and wide.

She is born to give birth to the Sun,

            even so Night opens her womb for the Dawn. [1]

 

With her reddening child, the white Mother comes blushing

            red: the dark Mother flings open her dark chambers.

            Both have the same Comrade, both are immortals, they

            follow each other, as they move measuring out earth

            and heaven and the hue beyond. [2]

 

They have the same path, the two sisters, the eternal Path

            which they follow one after the other as ordained by the Supreme:

They do not mingle, nor do they halt, the perfect Progenitors;

            Night and Dawn unlike in form are like in mind. [3]

 

            The shining One, the Leader, she awakens the right

            movements: she opens wide for us many a variegated door.

She moves the creation forward, she discloses for us felicity;

            Dawn manifests here all the worlds. [4]

 

            He who lies crooked, him you impel to walk straight,

            O Goddess of Plenty: you are there for our wide

            enjoyment, for our right impulsion, for our felicity.

 

Page 129

He who sees small, for him you saw vastly,

            Dawn manifests here all the worlds. [5]

 

You are for warrior strength, you are for the mighty

            impulsion, you are the Purpose of our travelling:

Dawn fronts all creatures of all varieties,

            she manifests here all the worlds. [6]

 

Behold, the Daughter of Heaven appears in front,

            the young damsel rises clothed in white:

She is the Ruler of the universe, Ruler of all earthly treasure:

O Dawn, O Perfect Delight, appear here today. [7]

 

She follows the path of those that are passing away,

            she is the first in the eternal series that is coming.

She rises and impels the soul upward,

            Dawn awakens someone who lay dead. [8]

 

O Dawn, you set the Fire to be perfectly kindled,

            through the eye of the Sun, you manifest all:

You awaken mankind to perform the Sacrifice

            all this happy work you accomplish for the sake of  the gods. [9]

 

Since when has she been coming nearer unto us?

when did she rise in the past, since when has she been rising now in the present?

She desires and follows after those that are gone,

she sets her thought forward and unites herself with the others. [10]

 

Earlier mortals who saw the rising Dawn have departed;

now she appears before our eyes;

And they who shall see in other dawns

are yet to come. [11]

 

You disperse the enemies, you foster the truth, you are born

of the truth, you are made of felicity, you impel the right movements.

You are the supreme Good, you bear in you what the gods

 

Page 130

desire. O Dawn, appear here today at your best and highest. [12]

 

Goddess Dawn appeared always of yore:

            even so, O Queen of Plenty, manifest all this here today.

And may she appear also in days to come:

            ageless and deathless she moves in her self-law. [13]

 

She shines with her gleamings in the spaces of heaven,

            the Goddess has discarded her dark robes.

Awakening all, Dawn comes with rosy steeds

            well-yoked to her chariot. [14]

 

She is the Fosterer, she brings desirable things:

and as she awakes, she creates a varied knowledge.

The image of those that are passing endlessly,

            the first of those that are manifest, Dawn rises wide refulgent. [15]

 

Climb high, O soul; strength is come to us,

            Darkness has fled; behold, the Light approaches.

She has opened the path for the passage of the Sun:

            We go there where life is carried ever forward. [16]

 

The flame-bearers, the adorers sing to the rising Dawn,

they utter the right-minded word.

Appear this day, O Goddess of Plenty, to him who expresses

            Thee, in me illumine a life rich with its fruitfulness. [17]

 

Dawns appear, luminous and omnipotent,

            for the sake of the mortal who makes the offering.

Even like the God of Life, they bestow as the right impulsions break forth, life's energies;

and these he enjoys who has the immortal drink purified. [18]

O Mother of the gods, the very Army of Aditi, the flaming

            knowledge of sacrifice, shine forth in thy vastness.

 

Page 131

O Creator of the perfect expression, manifest yourself in us for the sake of the supreme word:

O All-desirable, bring us to birth in the birth. [19]

 

The varied work which Dawns bring forward for him who accomplishes the sacrifice,

who gives the perfect expression- that is the Supreme Good,

That may Mitra and Varuna, and Aditi, and the waters and Earth and Heaven protect for us. [20]

 

 

 

HYMN TO THE SUN

 

Rishi Dirghatama

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala I, Sukta 164)

 

This is the delightful ancient One. He is the Summoner.

Next to him is the second brother: he is the Devourer.

            The third brother is the one with blazing front: here I saw the Lord of the Universe with his seven sons. [1]

 

The Seven yoke the chariot that has one single wheel: the Horse with seven names draws it.

            The Wheel has three naves. It is unaging and irresistible.

All the worlds repose upon it. [2]

 

Seven are they who drive the chariot, seven are he horses that draw the chariot with seven wheels.

Seven are the sisters who together move there where the herds with seven names are pent in. [3]

 

Who has been the First One taking birth: boneless himself he upbears that with bones.

Who was the Energy, the Blood, the Soul of this earth? And did any one ever approach the wise with the question? [4] 

 

Page 132

I am young, therefore do I ask: with my mind I am unable to know of those secreted seats of the Gods.

            Upon the moving seat the Seers spread out the seven threads as warp and woof. [5]

 

I have not the consciousness, so do I ask here of the seers who have the consciousness: not having the knowledge I ask for the knowledge.

Some one who is one and single has transfixed these six worlds as forms of the Unborn. [6]

 

            Here let him speak who knows of the secret step of this delightful one in his wide winging.

            From his head the white herds draw sweet milk: they put on a covering and drink water by their feet. [7]

 

In the Truth the Mother adores the Father: from the very beginning she has been united with him in consciousness and thought.

She quivered, her womb charged with streaming delight: they that carried their obeisances approached and found the Word. [8]

 

The Mother was united to the yoke by the right side: the embryo lay within all that was crooked.

            The child lowed after its mother and saw her as the world form in the three expanses. [9]

 

Three are the mothers, three the fathers, upborne by One standing above: they do not tire him down.

There, in that heaven, they utter the word which has the knowledge of the universe, which the universe cannot encompass. [10]

 

The wheel of Truth with its twelve spokes rolls on round the heaven and decays not.

O Agni, here the sons stay in pairs, seven hundred and twenty in number. [11]

 

The father who has five feet and twelve forms, they say, is on the higher hemisphere and he is delight itself.

 

Page 133

And there are those who say that one with clear vision is placed high above upon the seven wheels and six spokes. [12]

All the worlds repose upon that wheel rolling on with its five spokes.

            It axle is never over-strained, in spite of the heavy load, it never wears out in the course of eternity, fixed on its nave. [13]

 

The ringed wheel rolls on undecaying: the ten are yoked and they carry it upward.

Lo! there comes the sun's eye, encircled by the spaces. All the worlds are placed in there.[14]  

Sevenfold are they, born together: the seventh is born of the one, they say, and these six are seers and gods.

Their movements are fixed according to the status: they move out in varied forms for the sake of him who upholds them. [15]

 

Women are they and they are also men, it is said. He who has eyes is able to see, one blind does not know.      

The Son, the seer, is aware of it; and he who knows is the father of the father. [16]

 

The mother cow holds the hind legs of her calf by her fore legs and its fore legs with her hind legs and moves upward.

Whither, to which hemisphere, she is stepping across? Where does she give birth to the child? Not indeed in the midst of the herds. [17]

 

He, indeed, integrally knows the Father who knows the lower by the higher and the higher by the lower.

Who has the poet's vision to tell us where does the Divine Mind take birth? [18]

 

They that turn downward are said to turn upward and they that turn upward are said to turn downward.

Indra and thou, O Soma, both together have done deeds that upbear the luminous worlds as though joined to the yoke. [19]

 

Page 134

The birds with wings of beauty united together and as comrades cling to the same tree.

One of them eats of the sweet fruit; the other does not eat and looks about. [20]

 

There, where the birds with wings of beauty, in perfect knowledge, sing of their share in immortality.

The Lord and Protector of all the worlds, the Supreme Intelligence, enters into one young and ignorant as I am. [21]

 

Upon the tree dwell the birds of beautiful wings who eat of honey; from there they made the creation upon earth.

And on its top, there is the sweetest fruit, they say; none can reach it who knows not the father. [22]

 

Upon Gayatra is set the Gayatra, the Tristubha is carved upon Tristubha.

And that which is called Jagat, is set upon Jagat; they who know this attain immortality. [23]

 

The luminous verse is fashioned after the rhythm of Gayatra and with the verse is fashioned the chant of Soma and the Word with the rhythm of Tristubha.

The Word is fashioned with the Word, the Word has a two-fold and a four-fold stepping and the seven vocables are fashioned with the syllable. [24]

 

With Jagat the Stream was established firm in the Heaven; with Rathantara the Sun is seen all around up above.

The rhythm of Gayatra, they say, has a three-fold kindling; hence it goes farther beyond in its mighty greatness. [25]

           

That giver of milk, her I called here who yields milk readily: she is milked by a hand skilled in milking.

May the creator create for me the very best creation; the heat blazes; towards that I utter my words. [26]         

 

Professor of all wealth, she yearns with her mind and heart after her child: lo, she comes uttering her cry.

Inviolable may she yield the drink for the twin riders. May she grow and increase for the sake of the vast felicity. [27]

 

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The mother answered back to her child that was gazing at her; she cried aloud, as though to measure its head.

She desires after its foaming mouth; she shapes its form giving it to drink all her milk. [28]

 

There he is who cries out encompassing the white mother, he fashions the form seated secure above all disruption.

She builds up the mortal from within with her modes of consciousness. She has become the lightning and has shaken off her covering. [29]

 

The living one breathes and moves fast when it lies at rest: when it races along it holds itself firm within its station.

The soul in the mortal moves by its self-law; the immortal springs from the same source as the mortals. [30]

 

I saw him who protects, who never stumbles, who moves by paths here below and beyond.

He is with all, he is around all, he circles under cover, within all the worlds. [31]

 

He who has created this does not know it and he who has seen it is hidden away from it.

He is enclosed within the womb of the Mother: he produced the many and entered into untruth. [32]

 

Heaven is my father who created me: here is my central cord: the Mother, this vast Earth, binds me down.

The twin vessels are turned upward; within there the Lord ordained the birth of the daughter.

[33]

I ask you of the farthest end of the earth; I ask you where lies the nave of this world.

I ask you of the energy that the Horse rains down; I ask you of the supreme status of the world. [34]

 

This altar is the farthest end of the earth; this sacrifice is the nave of the world.

This Soma (the immortal drink) is the energy that the Horse rains down; and Brahman is the supreme status of the world. [35]

 

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The seven half-embryos are the energising sap of the world. As the infinite Lord ordained, they became the varied laws.

They are the knowers and with their intelligence and thought they encircle all around and they take from everywhere. [36]

 

I do not know what this is that I am, I am bound deep within and I roam about with my mind.

 

But the first-born child of Truth came to me, I had then my portion of the Delight in the Word it uttered. [37]

 

The one below goes upward seized by its own self-law: the mortal is one with the immortal at its origin.

They are eternal and move about divergently; one knows the other within oneself, another knows not the other within itself. [38]

 

In the luminous world, in the supreme status where the Gods have taken their seat over the universe –

He who does not know it, what can he do with the Word; but he who knows it sits in the company of the Gods. [39]

 

You have eaten of the sweet corn, may you possess the Divine Delight, may we too possess the Divine Delight.

None can slay you through all eternity: may you eat of the grass and drink of the pure water and roam at ease. [40]

 

The luminous one measures and gives form to the waters: she has a single status, a two-fold status and a four-fold status.

She has an eight-fold status, a nine-fold status and still becomes the thousand-fold letters in the supreme status. [41]

 

From Her the oceans flow out everywhere; by that the four directions live their life.

From there flow out that which does not flow; based upon that the universe lives its life. [42]

 

I saw from afar the smoke in its energy spreading high and wide.

 

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The heroes prepare the dappled Scatterer even like food; such were the first and pristine laws. [43]

 

Three are the Shining Ones who see widely in accordance with the law of the Truth: of them one plants the seed throughout the year, another labours upon the world with his effulgences, of still another the mighty rushing is seen, not the form. [44]

 

Four-fold is the Word as measured into steps: they are known to the poet-seers and to the great minds.

Three are embedded deep within and they do not move; the fourth is the speech that men utter. [45]

 

They say, it is Indra or Mitra or Varuna or Agni: it is the divine Bird with wings of beauty.

The One alone exists: the wise speak of it variously, they call it Agni or Yama or Matarishwan. [46]

 

The luminous birds with wings of beauty have clothed themselves with waters and they surge up along a dark path towards the heaven.

They have returned from the seat of Truth and in their bright energy lift up the earth to the wideness. [47]

 

Twelve are the spokes, the wheel is one and four are the naves: who indeed has known of them?

With them fixed together there are three hundred and sixty poles, that appear as though moving and yet not moving. [48]

 

That eternal breast of yours yields supreme delight: with that you nourish all desirable things.

That establishes felicity, discovers treasures, gives lavishly; O Saraswati, that do thou here affirm. [49]

 

The gods carry out the sacrifice with sacrifice; those were the first and pristine laws.

Those greatnesses cleave to heaven, there where dwell the gods who have been the ancient goal. [50]

 

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The same waters flow upward and again flow downward, day by day.

            The divine showers give life to the earth; the fires give life to heaven. [51]

 

            The Divine Bird, vast in its wings of beauty, is the source of the waters, the seer of earthly growths.¹

With its showers pouring all around he brings felicity. He flows ceaselessly on and on: him I call for the vast protection. [52]

 

AGNI AND THE GODS

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala X, Sukta 51)

 

THE GODS

Huge and firm was that covering with which you shrouded yourself and entered into the waters.

O Agni! You are conscious from your very birth. The One God saw you in all your multiple universal body. [1]

 

AGNI

Who saw me? Which of the gods saw my multiple body all around? O Mitra! O Varuna! Tell me, where do they dwell-all the blazing fuel that move to the gods? [2]

 

THE GODS

O Agni! god self-conscient, we seek you, you who have entered variably into the waters and into the growths of the earth. You shine richly. Yama has seen you as you flame out of your ten seats. [3]

 

AGNI

O Varuna! I fled because I was afraid of the work of the priest. The gods must not yoke me to that work.

 

¹ Or, is seen in the womb of the waters and of the earthly growths.

 

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That was why I embedded my body variably so that I as Agni may not know of that pathway. [4]

             

THE GODS

Come, O Agni! Man, the mental being, desires to do the sacrifice, he has made everything ready, and you dwell in obscurity!

Make easy-going the path that leads to the gods, with a happy mind carry the offering. [5]

 

AGNI

There were elders before Agni who covered the same path, even as charioteers do their way.

That is why, O Varuna! out of fear I have come away so far, even as an animal shrinks and shivers at a shooting arrow. [6]

 

THE GODS

We shall make your life undecaying, O Agni! so that no harm comes to you when engaged in the work.

So, carry to the gods their share of the offering; a happy birth you have, a happy mind you must carry. [7]

 

AGNI

Then bring to me my share of the mighty offerings, those that are given before, those that are given after and those that are simply given.

O gods! Long life to the being shining in the waters, to Agni himself lying in the growths of the earth. [8]

 

THE GODS

The offerings that precede, the offerings that follow, offerings pure and simple – all forceful, may you enjoy.

May this sacrifice be yours entirely. The four quarters bow down to you, O Agni! [9]

 

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HYMN TO THE PURUSHA

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala X, Sukta 51)

 

He has a thousand heads, the Supreme Being, a thousand eyes and a thousand feet.

He has covered the entire extended universe and exceeded it by the measure often fingers. [1]

 

All this is the Supreme Purusha, all that has become, and all that will become.

He is the master of Immortality and through Matter crosses beyond it. [2]

 

All this is His mightiness and even greater than all this is the Supreme Being.

All the worlds are His feet, His other three steps are the Immortality in heaven. [3]

 

The Supreme Being with his three steppings went upwards, He came down again in his fourth stepping:

And then spread Himself out variously towards the living and the non-living (that which eats and that which does not eat). [4]

 

From That was born the Vast, the Wide-ruling, the Over-Lord.

Even as He is born, He transcends all, He is behind the earthly world and He is in front. [5]

 

Through the Supreme Being the Gods make the offering and accomplish the sacrifice.

The Spring is its first primal offering, Summer is its fuel and Autumn the final giving. [6]

 

The Supreme Being took birth in the forefront, He is the sacrifice, Him they sanctified seated on the altar.

Through Him they accomplish the sacrifice, the Gods, the demi-gods and the Rishis. [7]

 

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All are offered unto Him and from Him are gathered the various elements of offering. [8]

 

And That created all the animals, all that are in the air, in the forests and the homesteads. [8]

 

All are offered unto Him and from Him are born Riks and Samas and the Chhandas and Yajuh. [9]

 

From Him are born the horses and they who are of either kind and the cows and from there are born even the goatkiml.¹ [10]

 

When they established Him vastly, in how many ways did they conceive Him? What was His face, how were His arms and how His feet they spoke of? [11]

 

The Brahmanas were His face, the royalties were made His arms, the traders were His thighs and the labourers (proletarians) were born of His feet. [12]

 

The moon was born from His mind, the sun from His eyes, the Lord of the senses and the Divine Fire from His mouth and air from the life-force. [13]

 

From the navel came out the mediate spaces, from His head rose the heavens, from the feet this earth, from His ears the ten directions. Thus were the worlds conceived. [14]

 

Seven were the circles around Him, the fuel made were three times seven. When the Gods were preparing the sacrifice, they tied the being as the offered animal.² [15]

 

Through the sacrifice did the Gods perform the sacrifice; such were the primal laws.

 

¹ Horses = vital energy; cows=light-energy; either kind = mixture of the two, e.g., mental energy; goat =aja = (lit.) unborn; the primal or pristine energy, that of Mother.

² The Supreme Consciousness sacrificed Himself, descended into Matter and became the Inconscient.

 

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Thus indeed they reached the heavens in their mightiness where dwell the the ancient Gods and demi-gods. [16]

 

HYMN TO HIRANYAGARBHA

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala X, Sukta 121)

 

 

In the beginning there was the Golden Child in the Womb.

From the very birth he became the sole Lord of creation.

He upheld the earth and this heaven.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [1]

 

He gives us our self, he gives us our strength!

His is the law that all the gods, all obey and adore.

Deathlessness is his shadow, and to him also Death belongs.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [2]

 

He by his greatness became the one king

Of all that lives and breathes, indeed of the whole world.

He is the Master of the race of men and of animals.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [3]

 

 

These snowy mountain-ranges are his greatness,

His are these oceans with all their sweet streams,

All these spaces are his, extended as his arms.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [4]

 

Through Him the heavens are high and the earth firm.

Through Him the world of light is steadied and the world of Bliss beyond;

In the inner ranges He measures the extensions.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [5]

 

Him the two firmaments in their vastness have transfixed:

They gaze at Him with their luminous mind:

There the sun rises up above and shines wide:

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [6]

 

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As the vast waters came down filling the universe,

They held Agni in their womb and gave him birth;

Then came forth the One Force of all the Gods:

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [7]

 

In his greatness He saw the waters all around,

Holding in himself the clear perception and ushering the sacrifice,

He is One God, Lord over all the Gods:

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [8]

 

May He not hurt as, He who is the Father of the Earth,

He the Lord of Truth who brought forth the heaven,

He who brought forth the delightful wide Waters.

Who then is the God to whom we make our offering? [9]

 

O Lord of creatures, through none else, none else

Are all these worlds born everywhere;

Whatever prayer we offer to you, may that be granted to us,

May we become master of all delights. [10]

 

 

HYMN OF THE SUPREME GODDESS

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala X, Sukta 125)

 

I move with the Rudras and the Vasus, with the Adityas, yea, with all the gods. I bear both Mitra and Varuna, both Indra and Agni and the twin Aswins. [1]

 

I bear the Soma that is to be pressed, I bear the Fashioner and the Fosterer and the Enjoyer. I give the Treasure to the sacrificer who carries the offering and delivers it, one who has brought out the perfect Soma drink. [2]

 

I am the Imperial Power, all wealth I gather together. Being conscious of all, I am the first of all sacrificial elements. Me the gods have established widely, in multiple places,

 

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me who am seated multiply and multiply entered into things. [3]

 

Through me he eats his food, whoever sees, whoever hears. They who do not recognise me, perish. You who have ears, who have faith, listen to what I tell you. [4]

 

I utter here that which is adored by the gods and by men. The one I choose, I make him supreme and he knows the Word and possesses the Knowledge. [5]

 

Rudra's bow I bend for him to slay the fierce enemies of the Truth; I am in the battle for the sake of the peoples, I have entered into heaven and earth. [6]

 

I have given birth to the Father, whose head is my birthplace – in the waters, in the ocean. From there I have entered into the worlds and have established myself wide and I touch with my body the far heaven. [7]

 

I rush like the wind as I drive all the worlds. That reaches beyond the heavens, beyond this earth, – such is the greatness that has manifested. [8]

 

 

ODE TO DARKNESS

 

(Rig-Veda-Mandala X, Sukta 127)

 

 

Night spreads wide, she comes everywhere, a Goddess with shining eyes – she looms over these glories as their overlord. [1]

 

The Immortal Goddess fills up the Vast above and below. She compels the darkness with her light. [2]

 

The Goddess comes and veils her sister, the Dawn, and glows through the blackness. [3]

 

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She is now that to us wherein we shall rest even as birds do on a tree. [4]

 

In her repose all habitations, all the footed and winged creatures, even the fast racing eagle. [5]

 

O Ocean-born Goddess! Smite the wolf, he or she, smite the robber! Carry us safely through. [6]

 

Black darkness clings to me all around, it stands here firm. O Dawn! clear it even as you do my debts. [7]

 

Daughter of Heaven! A Herd of light is this hymn of victory that moves towards you. I have made it for your sake. Do thou accept it, O Night. [8]

 

 

LAST HYMN

 

(Rig-Veda – Mandala X, Sukta 191)

 

 

O Flame! Master Strength! O Leader! You gather around you all the peoples of the world and bind them together. You burn bright in the high seat of Revelation, you bring us all the riches. [1]

 

Come together, all of you, speak in one voice, know with one mind, even like the gods who, of yore, knew with one mind and together had their share of enjoyment. [2]

           

Together may they utter the mantra, may they unite together, may their mind be one, their consciousness mingle.

I utter the same mantra with you all, with you all equally I make the offering. [3]

 

May your yearning be one, may your hearts be one, may your mind be one, so that your union be perfect. [4]

 

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THE ABOVE HYMN AS TRANSLATED BY SRI AUROBINDO:

 

O Fire, O strong one, as master thou unitest us with all things and art kindled high in the seat of revelation; do thou bring to us the Riches. [1]

 

Join together, speak one word, let your minds arrive at one knowledge even as the ancient gods arriving at one knowledge partake each of his own portion. [2]

 

Common Mantra have all these, a common gathering to union, one mind common to all, they are together in one knowledge; pronounce for you a common Mantra, I do sacrifice for you with a common offering. [3]

 

One and common be your aspiration, united your hearts, common to you be your mind, – so that close companionship may be yours. [4]

 

 

VICTORY TO THE WORLD MASTER

 

 

(THE TEN AVATARAS OF GITA GOVINDA)

 

 

In the waters of the Great Deluge, serving as a boat

            untroubled you upbear the Book of Knowledge.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the body of a Fish. Victory

            to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

The earth reposes on your far vaster back, heavily crusted

            with scales because of the load upon it.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the body of a Tortoise. Victory

to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

The earth clings to the edge of your tusk, even as the lunar

            stain is imbedded in the moon.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the body of a Boar. Victory

            to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

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The digits of your hands are like rose petals but the nails

at the end are like some strange horns, and these have

ripped open the body of the Asura, as through the body

of a bee.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the body of a Man-Lion. Victory

to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

A strange Dwarf, you duped Bali with your cunning; the

            water touched by your feet purifies human peoples.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the body of a Dwarf. Victory to

            the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

In the streaming blood of the warrior tribe you have bathed

the world, washed out all its sins, soothed the burning

            pain of earthly life.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the form of Parasurama.

Victory to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

In the ten directions, to the ten godheads you have

distributed the ten heads of Ravana, as a happy offering

            desired by them.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the form of the Prince of Raghus.

Victory to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

On your white body you have put on a blue robe that

matches beautifully with the blue Yamuna clinging to

you for fear of being dragged by your ploughshare.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the form of Haladhara (the

wielder of the plough). Victory to the Lord! Victory

to the Master of the World!

 

Oh, you condemn the sacrificial rites as ordained by the

Holy Scriptures, your heart melting at the sight of animals

            being slaughtered.

Lo, the Lord has assumed the form of the Enlightened One

(the Buddha). Victory to the Lord! Victory to the

            Master of the World!

 

To slay the whole host of the Invaders, you have unsheathed

your sword, how frightful, even as a streaming comet!

 

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Lo, the Lord has assumed the form of Kalki.

Victory to the Lord! Victory to the Master of the World!

 

Listen to the sublime hymn that brings happiness and

welfare, the very cream of creation, sung by the

poet Jayadeva.

 

I bow down to Krishna, to his ten incarnations, to him who

saves the Vedas, who bears the world, uplifts the earth,

slays the Titans, confounds Bali, destroys the Kshattriyas,

conquers the son of Pulastya, wields the Plough, who

pours out his compassion, to him who routs the Hostiles.

 

 

A HYMN

 

The high Thought, the mighty Strength, the living Sap, the Delight streaming in the hearts of things, the treasure-house Qf all that we gain and hold, all Fulfilment lie at her feet. We bow down to her. She is the Mother, the nectar agleam in Sri Aurobindo's eyes: she upholds the very frame of all existences, she is Mira, the luminous, the dispeller of inner darkness, she maintains this wide and entire earth.

 

Victory, to Him, our Lord Sri Aurobindo, Reality whole and global! Victory to the sustainer of the worlds, the Mother Mira Qf white radiance! To their integral Yoga all victory – may it manifest fully on earth! And victory to those who follow it, the fortunate spiritual brotherhood!

 

His smile, shadow less and luminous, lifts up the earth into a joyous blossoming; his flaming eye of Light destroys the darkness; he carries in his hands the supreme Good of the future in all its richness. Lo, our Lord and Master shines resplendent.

 

She brings into our path of vision the Essence however difficult to perceive, she brings into the sphere of speech even

 

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that which is too remote for words; she draws from the dry being the flow of the sap of life: she sustains the smallest of the small to the end of the ages. A Force indefinable, of marvellous plenitude, she is fostered and impelled – as though herself possessing no autonomy of her own – by the ever-victorious golden glance gleaming from the divine lotus-eyes of our Lord.

 

We bow, we bow to the resplendent Light of the Master, the Light that has assumed the supreme form of a woman, the Light that liberates the imprisoned power of humanity from the bonds of weakness and ignorance and fashions it for the New Age.

 

Glory to Mother Mira, in whom are constellated the world-rejuvenating radiances, Glory to the Lord, the Master, Sri Aurobindo, who reigns victorious with the Gracious Mother.

 

 

A PRAYER

 

Sweats of passion flow in streams down his temples, Their fragrance draws swarms of bees that swirl about driven by his fanning ears. Gods and angels and seraphs sing to Him. He is Shiva's son, Shiva who bears the Goddess Ganges on his head. In Him I take refuge.

He dwells in the thousand-petalled lotus, luminous cool like the full orb of the moon, his lotus-hands carry grace and protection. He wears a robe of pure sweet-scented flowers, ever-smiling and gracious-looking. He embodies all the gods. He is the Spirit, the soaring Bird on the crown of the head. Remember Him and worship Him in any fair form. He is the Guru.

He shines bright 'within the lotus-centre of the head like the soothing moon; like the brilliant sun he flashes; his arms extend to protect and to give. He is radiant like burning camphor. He wears a white robe and white garlands, he is anointed white. His consort gleams like lightning, as she clings to him athwart

 

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one-half of his body. He is the Guru, full of Grace. I worship him in adoration.

 

He is the warp with which this world of moving and unmoving things is woven, he is the woof that runs through all. His grace releases even the animal-kind from all bonds. He dwells in the sounds, as of Om, that are uttered as mantra, he is the light of all the luminaries. He is vast as the skies, he is the Supreme, he is Shiva, he is the fullness of Light, to Him I surrender with a steadfast thought.

O Goddess, protect us by your spontaneous Grace, forgive all our offences, against the supreme Light of all lights. It is he who assumes a multitude of forms; he dwells in the lotus heart of the universe, he makes the laws that upbear the status and dynamism of the cosmos, he alone is able to awaken all to knowledge. 0 Goddess, remove all evil forthwith and for ever, be constantly present in us.

May the divine Master, Guru Bhaskara, protect us from every evil and danger. May he manifest himself to reveal the essential mystery of his path of worship and to spread the true tradition of Knowledge.

OM! I bow to the lotus feet of the most revered Guru!

The Supreme Shiva is an intense and concentrated Delight, luminously aware of his integral, infinite and supreme consciousness, with all the gathered rays of the supernal awareness. He has no other form than that of light. He is whole and undivided. But when he emits the rays of his light he assumes the form of the Eternal Benign, replete with the manifoldness of his own Ananda. The Supreme God, the adorable Shiva, thus took a manifest form to create the universe. He then brought forth the eighteen Sciences and all the systems of philosophies; he assumed the forms of various personalities by his own Lila.

Thereupon questioned by his Divine Consort who is All-awareness, who is one and identical with him, he uttered five sacred scriptures with his five mouths, the scriptures which are the essence of the true spiritual knowledge. He introduced, established and spread them through the great preceptors, divine or human, through those who are perfect or realised Beings, for the supreme good of the world. This is what is called Tantric Process.

 

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Thus in the path of Tantra, widely extended as it is through the long tradition of its preceptors; the meditative concentration on the image, the repetition of the sacred formulas, Mantra-Japa, and other various methods mentioned in different scriptures are meant to provide easy ways suited to the sadhaks of the different natures. They make no difference to the fundamental Truth and principle which remains always the same. And this is called Sri Vidya which is the essential substance of all the sacred Scriptures, the essence of the four great steps of Tantra (Charya, Kriya, Jnana and Yoga) expounded in all its precepts.

This High Knowledge (Vidya) has been very secretly taught by the different branches of Yajurveda in their hymns and their Upanishadic versions. It has been mysteriously revealed by the various branches of Rigveda in their hymns or their Upanishadic versions. It is mystically awakened through a certain subtle duct in the body, evoked by manifold metrical hymns of the Sarna Veda. This Vidya is commonly found in all the Vedas. It is the essence of all Vedic mantras, Brahmanas and Upanishads. It is the Queen of the Shaktichakra, a wave of supremely great light, a form or embodiment of supreme consciousness. This is a mystic truth inherited from a tradition of Gurus.

The tradition enjoins that to realise this Maha-Vidya a sadhaka should take an initiation and do the ceremonial worship as directed. And when initiated by a true adept he must first meditate on the Holy Feet, Sri Mahapaduka, uttering the sacred words that mean "I adore the Sri Mahapaduka in the eight-petalled white lotus that looks upward, that has twelve extremities and that is established within the womb of the thousand-petalled lotus, spread out like an umbrella and facing downward. The great Holy Feet is possessed of all sciences, embodies the Powers of all deities. It represents the three strides of the holy preceptor in the three centres, the crown (Brahma-randhra), the heart and the lower abdomen, even as it is richly decorated with resplendent ornaments."

Then the sadhak must contemplate the Twin Deity, Shiva and Parvati, the aggregate of all the gods, and possessed of the Gnostic Light displayed in the burning of the three cities of demons. They wear red and white garlands and garments,

 

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ointments and ornaments. They shower the desirable boon of divine protection with the twin hands outstretched in mysterious gesture of lotus embrace; delightful face and eyes they have, the mind enraptured in knowledge and bliss, their form is the very image of the supreme Guru, with his' red and white lotus-feet.

Next the sadhak must think himself flooded in his body with the outpourings of nectar from His lotus-feet; the immortalising streamings from the wash of those Feet purge him of all evil and free him from all the impurities obstructing the fulfilment, viz., the inflow of the Force (Shakti-pata) that must result from the Shiva-Initiation, contemplation on the Supreme Shiva as Guru, uttering the Japa-mantra of the Holy Feet. It is thus that the sadhak must adore the divine Master.

Then he must contemplate, as force in his mantric vision, the Light wave ranging from the lowest mystical circle to the opening in the crown he must know and realise it as rising up from the bottom of the spine to the crown of the head. He should meditate on it and realise that it is the tan-coloured point of lightning and the golden rising sun; it is a flaming Force which is no other than the Original Consciousness, it acts like a kindled fire that burns the knots of sin. Then he should contemplate on himself and see that his tangles of evil and sin that impede the fruition of Initiation and the flow of shakti, have all been burnt out by the gathered rays reflected from the spontaneous Grace of the original consciousness-force. All the bonds of evil and sin having thus been destroyed by its rays, he must remember in his inner heart the original Divine Knowledge with the following prayer:

"May the Goddess Kundalini, luminous as the new-risen sun, rise up from her abode, in her graceful movement to open the centres (lotuses) in succession on her way upwards and kindle the spiritual light by the nectarous rays of the Abode of Shiva."

"The Kundalini Power rises up with all her immortal sweetness and through various processes that consolidate the vehicle, by worshipping Shiva, the seed of the three status; may She, Shiva's consort, bring the supreme good.

She is Shiva's Consort. May she bestow on us an immeasurable splendour. She has the glow of a mass of vermillion and

 

Page 153

the crescent moon as her crest ornament, her face agleam with the triple eyes of bliss, bent with 'the weight of the full breasts, She is the supreme charm of Love.

She is Shiva's Consort. She shines like a Bandhuka-flower, may She manifest in my heart. She graces all quarters of the sky with her wide eye-lotuses, her lotus-feet are swept by the crests on the crowns of Gods, as they humbly bow down to her; she is heavy with her rounded breasts. She bears a newly risen crescent. May she the Supreme Goddess of the three worlds create bliss in the inner instruments of my consciousness. May she pierce and open the six centres that are now closed and inhabited by ghouls and goblins; and may she open them in an intimacy with the gods, Brahma and others, through the the action of the mystical letters [numbered four, six, ten, twelve, sixteen and two respectively, beginning with 'sa' to which 'ksha' and 'ha' are also added.]

"The sadhaka, whose body is graced in quality and movement should contemplate on Parvati. She will swiftly pierce the three knots from the lowermost centre (Muladhara) upward, open the lotuses and awaken the dense intense bliss laden with consciousness, she will come forth from the fountain of nectar that flows from the nectared home of the vibrating heaven and shine like the impetuous lightning.

"May the embodied form of Parvati grant us the abode and status of Shiva which is the crown of bliss and is constantly sought for by the highest scriptures, Shruti; that the crescent moon illuminates, that presides over all the worlds, that eliminates the sufferings of the devotees. May She constanly bestow on us all the blessed things.

"Let me take refuge in the Consort of Shiva (his left half), her anklets tinkle sweetly, and She is the origin of the Universe as also of all speech.

"We take shelter with the Consort of Shiva (his left half) who is not divided from him. She is resplendent like a huge sapphire. Bended with the weight of her orbed breasts, she looks harmoniously elegant with all the splendour of her brilliant ornaments on her body, she is the sole origin of the Universe, constantly sought by the highest scriptures.

"The Yogi must dissolve all the five causes into the supreme Shiva, who is beyond Time and Space etc., into the Void that

 

Page 154

is nothing else but Consciousness, and is not dependent on anything. He must fix and finally settle himself into that Void Shiva with a calm and steady mind and merge all his senses into it. Thus he attains easily the fruit of the Yoga, viz., the ever-existing Immutable."

In this manner he must meditate on the Kundalini as his Tutelary deity, remember the multitude of marshalled rays and complete the remaining process. Then he must control the movements of his senses and his consciousness in the self-existent and self-contained Void that is. the cause of all, and

should perform the worship in his outer body (in its physical force) or in the twin life-principle or the essential consciousness itself according to his stage of sadhana or his inner fitness. He must finally settle himself in the wideness of the Highest Consciousness, from where there is no beyond, and thus move freely and blissfully.

This is the highest truth of Tantra which can only be attained by the Grace of the Guru. This has been expounded by Yogishananda Nath Nilakantha Sharma Joshi, the disciple of Sri Amba Nanda Nath, as commanded by the Mother, the incarnate Divine Force, for the delight of the sadhakas who are freed from all evil by a single ray from the glance cast by the Grace of Sri Aurobindo, the great seer.

Bliss for all!

 

Page 155

 

Padavali

 

 

(1)

 

Even like a drop of water into burning sands.

       Am I in the midst of sons and friends and women.

I have turned my mind from you and bestowed it upon them.

       Of what earthly use shall I be now?

 

Oh Lord of Love, hopelessness is my doom!

But you are the Saviour of the worlds­ –

ever kind to the destitute.

Now my whole trust lies in you alone.

 

Half of my life I spent in sleep,

The rest in infancy and old age

And with women in pleasure-groves;

I had no time to give to you.

 

Countless are the Gods who die and pass!

But you have no beginning, nor end:

All are born in you and die again in you,

Even as waves upon the seas.

 

Vidyapati in dread of the last summons, cries:

There is no way out for me but Thee alone.

They say, you are the Lord, the beginning,

              the beginningless,

To save the world is the burden you have taken

              upon yourself.

 

                                                                                         VIDYAPATI

Page 156

(2)

O my sister, ask me not how I feel!

But the sweetness of it, as I try to tell it,

       turns ever new at each moment!

Since my very birth I have gazed and gazed upon the Beauty,

       but my eyes are never satisfied;

For aeons and aeons, I laid heart upon heart

       but the heart is not appeased,

Night on night I passed in utter ravishment

       but I could never seize the sense of the game.

Oh, the experts speak in praise of the nectar

       but none has spotted it anywhere!

Vidyapati says, of the soul's satisfaction

       not even one in a million possessed it.

 

                                                                                      VIDYAPATI

 

 

 

(3)

 

O my sister, there is no end to my sorrows!

This is the season, this is the month

Filled to the brim with the rains. . .

And my own home is empty!

Ceaseless the clouds roar and rumble,

The whole world is overflooded:

But my beloved is away and cruel Cupid

aims at me his sharpest arrows!

Thunderclaps burst in hundreds and gladden

the peacock to a maddening dance;

the frogs are drunk and the drakes cry hoarse,

0 my poor heart is about to burst!

Masses of darkness load the black night,

the lightnings never rest in their lengthening chains.

Vidyapati says how shall you without the divine comrade

pass your days and nights!

 

                                                                                                  VIDYAPATI

 

Page 157

(4)

 

Love dwells upon Love

And upon Love again dwells the spirit:

Upon the spirit dwells the spirit

And upon the spirit dwells the Bliss.

 

Within the heart stays delight,

Upon the delight dwells the Flow;

And upon the Flow dwells the Fount

But who could sense the happiness there!

 

Flowers dwell upon flowers

And upon the flowers dwells the sweet scent

Upon the scent dwell the Four Letters;

It is a riddle to spell!

 

The shore dwells upon the shore,

And upon the Shore dwell the waves.

Waves dwell upon waves­ –

Only a few know of it!

 

The Two dwell upon two:

Some may guess something of it:

Upon these dwells the Love

Thus speaks the twice born Chandidas!

 

                                                                                  CHANDIDAS

 

Page 158

 

 

This time I have found the secret.¹

One who has the secret has taught me the secret. ²

I have found a man who comes from a land

       where there is no night.

Day or evening, both are equal to me now.

       Lo! Evening is a barren lady.

Sleep has fled, no more shall I sleep.

       I am awake through all the ages.

Now I have handed over sleep to him

to whom it belongs:

I have sent sleep to sleep.

I have mixed borax and sulphur and, like a goldsmith,

I have brought out the purest gold

And I shall scrub and clean the temple of jewel.

Prasad says: Devotion and Liberation

I carry on my head,

Now I know that Brahman is another name of Shyama,

       my Mother,

And I have abandoned all pious observances and practices.

 

(2)

 

A dark cloud has arisen in the sky within:

And my soul, like a peacock, dances about

in sheer merriment.

 

¹ This time I have found the heart of things.

² He who is the Heart of things has taught me the things of the heart.

 

Page 159

The earth with her eager lips cries, "mother, O mother",

       as in thunder roll

And the soft smile of love's ecstasy makes the

lightning gleam

And tears flow ceaselessly like ceaseless rains.

The rainbird, my heart, is now eased of all fear.

Not in this life nor in the next nor in lives hereafter,

Ramprasad says, no more shall he take birth

in a human womb.

 

(3)

 

O my mind! Are you in quest of That?

O insane that you are dwelling in a dark dungeon!

That is the very object of love, how can one

seize it without love?

O my mind, hold firm the third eye in front

with all your gathered power.

Within the chamber, there is a dark chamber,

Oh, when it dawns, That will go into hiding!

In all the visions of philosophy there was no vision of that

nor in all the scriptures and revelations.

The Enjoyer of the enjoyment in Devotion,

That swells ever in delight within the home.

In the quest of love, that is the supreme yogi

       doing yoga age after age.

When love arises, it seizes you even as a magnet

does a piece of iron.

Prasad says, I am in quest of That in the form of the Mother­ –

But do I break the secret and scatter it

under the open sky?

O my mind, rather try to understand through signs

       and signals.

 

(4)

 

My body is now my Mother's field

       What danger is there in it any more?

The Supreme Divine Himself is the wise sower

       And He has sown the seeds of His great Mantra.

 

Page 160

  All around the body, his Law has raised the fencing

       And my trust has given. it its firm supports.

What can time, the arch thief, do now?

       For the Timeless has become the Protector.

The six bullocks within saw and heard

       and have already bolted;

The sharp edge of the scythe that is the Mother's name

       has cut away all the sinful weeds,

Love and devotion are showering their fostering rains

       day and night. . .

O my friend, the four great fulfilments are the fruits

       that the Mother's bounteous Grace has yielded.

 

(5)

 

Her whole head of hair run loose, a belt of human figures

       round her waist the lady of beauty dances upon her lord:

The human ray and the solar ray blaze in her eyes,

       her face is the very orb of the moon.

Infant bodies shot with arrows dangle from her ears

               as ear rings;

       in her left hands a sword and a sundered head.

A right hand calls down safety and security:

 

       Oh! the dark beauty of her matchless body.

Ever in abandoned ecstasy lay her limbs,

       her laughter pours out streaming nectar.

All this is her self-robe: "Fear not! Fear not!" she proclaims,

       the youthful damsel, beloved of the Lord!

Be gracious to Prasad, 0 darling to my Lord,

       I have such fear of this ocean of a world!

You are the secret word that wipes away all suffering:

       your feet alone hold for me

               all the holy places of pilgrimage.

 

Page 161

 

 

In the boundless heavens the Great Ascetic,     

Vast Time keeps vigil.

 

He keeps vigil

For a manifestation till now unconceived, unimagined,

That none has yet known,

That has revealed itself nowhere.

 

In the air, in the sky the new music

That rose never and nowhere in the world,

Prepares itself in a mystery sphere

Through songs ringing out the secret heart's silent voices.

The dams round the celestial city shall crumble,

The flood of the New Harmony shall rush forth

And the ancient walls of a deaf age

Shall be swept away.

 

One who is remembered no more,

One whose name none has ever heard,

One for whom the whole universe waits unknowingly

On the roadside just for a glimpse­ –

 

His truth in its supreme ecstasy

Shall overwhelm man's mind with its magic touch,

And in a moment the old, inert, dead shell

Shall dissolve­ –

 

It is for Him through all the ages

The great Time Spirit keeps vigil.

 

Page 162

"PROTECT ME"

 

“Protect me when in danger”,

       Such is not my prayer, O Lord!

              Rather to fear not when in danger.

In grief and pain, when the heart is sore

       I do not crave for solace,

              Rather to conquer grief and Pain.

When no help or aid is near,

       To hold my own strength unbroken:

When the world brings nothing but loss

       and the only gain is frustration,

              Not to let my soul yield and sink.

 

Lighten my burden, bring me comfort;

       Such is not my prayer, O Lord!

               Rather to be strong to bear the burden.

In days of happiness, with bowed head,

       To look and find your face,

In unhappy nights

       When the whole earth turns away,

Never to doubt of your Presence.

 

 

THE  DANCER'S  WORSHIP

 

Have mercy, O merciful One! I bow to Thee, I bow!

I call upon Thee, O Peerless!

In the delight of dance

My soul rings out her heavings.

 

My body, in every limb, calls yearningly,

Lost is my lore in Thy voice

Pouring music all around into a new birth:

My adoration leaps out in music in every limb of mine.

 

Oh! This supreme pain that aches my soul,

Squeezes my heart,–

 

Page 163

The swell in the sea of Peace

Where Beauty awakes!

 

All my being, all my pain

Has built this adoration of mine;

May it not end in shame,

This life-offering at Thy Feet!

 

I have not culled flowers from any woodland,

I have not gathered fruits,

Empty is my jar,

I have not filled it with holy water.

 

Into every limb of mine, my heart

Freed from all bonds

Pours out streams

From the Beyond.

 

At Thy Feet may it lose itself utterly,

In this sacred service of worship.

My adoration leaps out in music

In every limb of mine!

 

 

THE LANDS OF BENGAL

 

The lands of Bengal, the waters of Bengal,

       The winds of Bengal, the fruits of Bengal:

Blessed be they, Blessed be they,

       Blessed by they, O lord!

 

The huts of Bengal, the marts of Bengal,

       The woods of Bengal, the meadows of Bengal:

Be they full, be they full,

       Be they full, O Lord!

 

The vows of Bengal, the hopes of Bengal,

       The acts of Bengal, the voices of Bengal:

 

Page 164

Be they true, be they true,

       Be they true, O Lord!

 

The hearts of Bengal, the minds of Bengal,

       In homes of Bengal, brothers and sisters all:

Be they one, be they one,

       Be they one, O Lord!

 

Page 165

 

O GODDESS, VENDOR OF LIBERTY

 

O goddess, vendor of liberty!

Bind me not in thy boundlessness;

And in the unending path of destiny

Happy be thy unmoving voyage.

 

Goddess, veiling the Love Eternal,

Come to our mortal land, here bring Heaven's nectar,

To this transient pilgrim life;

O Guide eternal! draw the pause of our tiresomeness.

 

O Mind of magic!

A stirless stream art thou upon our stilled earth,

As though the sweet enchanted ocean engulfing a golden boat –

O I kiss the Twin Hearts!

 

 

               THE VIGIL

(A Surrealistic Poem)

 

Twigs and straws, broken bits, strewn about

              in a lumber room – all nettles' teeth.

Shadows, somewhat old and familiar, humming low

                                                  make a merry band.

If you have the trump card to flick down,

                         the whole game would turn right about:

In the blue hibiscus bush of adolescence – Io,

                                           the dumbfounded Sesame!                                             

Page 166

THE NET IS CAST

 

The net is cast and the pool is a drunken

                                              swell and swirl:

Shrunken blackened petals are afloat,

       Oh, the children that came down under a curse:

Fortunate are they who remember past lives; here

              it is a midnight trap for rats­ –

If this were all the shelter, the other shelter

                                           would be nowhere.

 

No more time to lose – whose is the refrain

              coming back again and again?

Whose the image looking straight into your eyes

                             level to level – since when?

Under the rotting weeds they go down

                             into the depths one by one

Flowerets that grandmother wove into a pattern,

       as though with the lightest strokes of a brush!

 

 

                                                                               RUHIRA SHYAM

 

 

 

BARITONE

 

Let us all move together, one and all,

Together into the cavern of the ribs,

Raise there a song of discordant sounds­ –

Red and blue and white, kin or alien.

 

Listen, the groan plays on:

Dreams as if possessed

Swing, like bats on branches;

Is now the time for dance?

Come, let us all move together, one and all.

 

Let the streams meet in the body, one and all;

Yea, let the bones brighten up still more,

 

Page 167

Let us all go around the fire

And scrape and eat of the very liver of the Muse. . .

Let us go, let us go, let us go one and all.

 

 

TO THE MOTHER

              21 February 1959

 

Hold me so to Thy breast, O Mother,

Let aeon after aeon pass,

I'd on Thy bosom, Mother,

Rest my head for e'er.

 

Closed are all my concerns with life,

Closed are all my dealings with the world,

Renounced are all my desires,

For the celestial sweetness of Thy Love.

 

Not for me the royal seat,

Not for me ruby and robe,

Nothing, nothing but Thy touch alone

Can fill the thirst of my soul.

 

Immersed Thou art in bliss,

In the boundless bliss of Thy infinite consciousness,

Hold me, bind me, 0 Mother,

To Thy breast of eternal ecstasy.

 

 

DAYS. . . NIGHTS. . . AGES

 

Days. . . Nights. . . Ages. . .

A shattered mind without solace.

Words. . . tunes. . . rhythms.

What else but sighs of misery.

 

Page 168

Eyes unwinking and tearful

Close at the lashing even of a frown;

Vain lament weeps its winding ways

Only to mock at me.

 

And yet desires cry out in despair

And hopes rise in life's bosom. . .

The path ahead lies through dust and gale.

I hear afar the breathings of a high flood.

 

I long for the song of freedom,

But helpless the mind is bound in its own webs

And I follow the tortuous path in front

Through nights. . . ages.

 

                                                                                           LABANYA PALIT

 

 

 

IN THY NAME

 

 

In Thy name the eyes are still dim with tears

And the heavens tremulous with the song of birds.

 

In Thy name a world of flowers is still in bloom

And on memory's waters spread grey yearnings and illusions.

 

In Thy name Love lingers still in the bosom

And the wounded heart weeps and laughs in silence.

 

In Thy name a blue spell still dwells upon life

And eyes in their depths enshrine a mournful dark shadow.

 

 

                                                                                                                   PARIMAL CHAKRABARTY

Page 169

YESTERNIGHT

 

There passed a storm last night:

A whole forest of trees that grew lush in my mind

Now stand shorn of their leaves

Like rows of skeletons.

Last night a cruel, ruthless storm

Passed by.

 

Yet in its very wake,

A crescent moon,

Like a necklet

Rose in a corner of the sky.

I gazed at it

And the memory of the storm vanished:

The withered forest of the mind

Bathed in a wondrous light.

 

The crescent moon, like a necklet . . .

Was it your mouth, was it your eye?

O my far one!

 

                                                                       RAMAKRISHNA PRASAD CHATTOPADHYAYA

 

 

 

A FIRE-FLY IS THIS MIND

 

A fire-fly is this mind,

Now it flares, now it fades;

It must cross the darkness,

So runs about here and there.

 

As if a needle of light

I t pierces the mighty curtain:

On an edge of the inner being

It weaves a fringe of glimmering consciousness.

 

Page 170

Even like a lightning flash

In this small bit of my sky

That too gleams

Off and on.

 

A fire-fly is this mind

And I know it will never receive an answer:

Around lies a blind Night, dark, impenetrable

Ever dumb.

 

Within there as if the spark of a question

This fire-fly of the mind

With no reason blooms and withers.

It vainly believes that all existence hangs on it

As a flower on its stem.

 

And yet

There is a secret rumour in the darkness

As creation rows along dashing and splashing.

To that measure does this fire-fly of the mind

Glimmer – flare and fade

Seeking an ascension elsewhere

Beyond knowing and unknowing.

 

 

                                                                                    PREMENDRA MITRA

 

 

 

ON LOSING

 

Have you ever lost your way

Mar from marts and paths and cities

in an endless meadow Where with a lone simool

The sky passes its life-long day?

 

There after a long search for a road

The earth lies down, eyes closed,

Heart reposed,

The lone simool at her head standing silent.

 

Page 171

Tired in the search for a road

Some chance one day to arrive at the meadow,

Amazed they look

About and above.

 

There where no road exists

Just a trail appears of a new hope,

Where all other ways are lost

One seems to find one's own.

 

One day, why not, go out and lose your way,

leave your familiar city for the unknown meadow,

There where a lone simool and the sky

Stand and look into each other's eyes.

 

 

                                                                                             PREMENDRA MITRA

 

 

 

INTO THE BOAT

 

Trampling my own shadow

on a long, long path I came

And saw a river of gladness.

I pushed the bank with my left foot

And with the right landed

          into the boat.

 

Here a straw canopy over the head,

A wooden floor to sit upon,

A helm sure and certain,

an oar within reach

And a sail to unfurl in the sky, –

All were there:

A whole lung-full of breath

turned into a flight of pigeons

  that found the sky.

 

 

                                                                                            PURNENDUPRASAD BHATTACHARYA

 

Page 172

TREMBLINGLY    I    WAIT

 

I know not when you may arrive

From behind the light:

The waves may break upon the door

And I shall stretch out my hands In a tremor.

 

I have lived ages in the embrace of the shade:

Now I do not see the earth's sun

I have made a home of the shade:

I have not seen myself

Mirrored nor in the light, nor in the air

Nor in the water.

 

Tremblingly I wait:

I know not when you may arrive

From behind the screen of light,

Out of my sight, in the pattern of cruel falsehood

I have been used

And for ages I know not myself.

 

Tremblingly I await:

I know not when you may arrive

Just from behind my own self!

 

 

TIMELESS

 

Time and Space endless, seamless the grey ocean,

Then aeons of trance broke into a voiceful play of tossing waves

And last an insentient earth now holds in her womb the seed of

consciousness.

 

 

We who have seen a red lotus blazing ceaselessly

And a white lotus ever winkless upon the earth. . .

Do we yet understand? Can we assess the value?

 

Page 173

Even today the earth is sundered and man goes hungry and

tortured,

Blood burns in pain, life lives barren in the veins;

And still, O Lord, thou hast sent thy messengers time and

again

Who brought with them the legacy of the starry lights. . .

Another hunger, another untamed pain now

Has awakened a sudden mighty restlessness in the roots of

the being!

It is Night's low tide: in the dark we tug the boat on . . .

Sinews we have none, when shall we fly our wings,

when shall the consciousness dawn?

 

 

 

NIGHT  COMES  BACK

 

Night comes back again and again, and yet

It goes back again and again, and

The morning sky rings with the quiet and tranquil music of Light.

 

Sorrow comes back again and again, and yet

It goes back again and again, and

Life swells with the billowing ocean of Delight.

 

Death comes back again and again, and yet

It goes back again and again, and

Man's deathless world sings the hymn of Birth.

 

 

          NIRENDRA LAL CHAKRAVARTI

 

Page 174

CLOUDS, EVENING AND  I

 

Clouds, evening and I

stand under the sky.

It appears

Daylight is an illusion

And darkness is real:

And I have gone back again into the womb

and effaced the scars of time.

Time here is timelessness.

When you are in its embrace

there is no death nor birth,

You are just a grey notch upon the sky –

Ended the earth's business, vanished the crowd.

 

 

           SANJOY BHATTACHARYA

 

 

 

MY  MIND  MUST  HAVE  YEARNED

 

My mind must have yearned for some purest white:

That is why one day the sunbright embrace of hills

and clouds left me enchanted­ –

And I find another light in the light of my eyes.

This is also the whiteness of the soul in its vastness:

It illumines smoothly

the thickened darkness among the stars;

Its silence descends like moonbeams­

The whole business of life seems

            to possess that alone;

and in the dark cave of the heart it is that I seek,

            I seek.

 

 

SANJOY BHATTACHARYA

 

Page 175

THE SHADOW OF THE HARBOUR

 

A dismal shadow upon the harbour,

            A broad day in swoon. . .

But you are restive, my beauty! my love!

 

Wipe then the red mark on your memory,

            forget the words of promise. . .

The bank heaves with the rising tide. . .

            all's ready for the drift!

 

Boats and masts and sails and the

             bustle and hubbub. . .

And your secret desire and the boundless swell of waters.

 

I too cast my blood's yearning into the streaming flow. . .

My destiny, the gloomy shadow upon the harbour.

 

 

                 SUNIL KUMAR NANDI

 

 

 

BEYOND SOUND AND LIGHT

 

Oh, wipe out all the light of the sky,

The whole world of the sun must never be seen

Anywhere.

Kindle the flame of the eye that is turned

Inward­ –

The darkness in the heart – and see

If it does not grow yet more dark.

 

And then, the sounds surging mountain-high,

Let them, even like a landslide, hurtle down,

One and all of these shouting particles

Under the shelter of Night's solitude:

Seal up your ears, listen to the stillness

Within the heart, listen

If it is yet more still...

 

Page 176

Silence evermore, solitude evermore,

Darkness evermore –

In my heart shines the light of countless suns

And I shall know if you are there!

 

 

DEBIPRASAD MAITRA

 

 

 

A BIT OF LIGHT

 

A bit of light within my soul,

But more perhaps is there of darkness.

Darkness hides in secret

In the fathomless depths.

A streak from some Dawn

Shall touch one day this soul

And this soul shall rise

Out of the Darkness

And in its body of a flooding fountain

Shall achieve a full-throated cadence.

So shall the Secret be relumed.

My love in the core of my heart

I have borne everywhere around.

You will see every breath

Has left there its imprint­ –

Oh, you will see there a child

Pure and innocent

And you will long to clasp it

Within your bosom.

 

 

SANJAYA BHATTACHARYA

 

Page 177

WATER LOTUS

 

Oh, the deep, the unerring aim:

In a moment you did it, Ocean.      

And you knew not even the gift you made. . .

In barren June you brought down the whole monsoon.

 

Jewels and pearls, emeralds and sapphires,

Summer and autumn, rain and spring,

Dreams and desires and gains, all

All are faint images of inanity.

 

Towers and arches, columns and corridors

Crumble down, huge abysses fade out:

Decline or fall effaced in a moment.

 

Alone survives the heaving flatness,

The humid heart seeps with its dripping liquid,

It melts in an ardent embrace, in an unerring gesture!

 

Into your waters, this water is poured out,

offering all unto the last,

O, the Deep, the Vast, receive within you

This lotus, flower of the water!

 

 

NABENDRA CHAKRABARTY

 

 

 

SOBS SWAY NATURE...

 

Sobs sway Nature. . . whose are the sobs?

In the sky even beyond Sight: drops of pain. . . whose are these?

The blue is mute. . . aeons pass. . . a frozen stillness. . .

Even now here am I, an illusory proxy bird. . .

I write poems picking up the twinkles of stars

as they scatter their hues and shed their petals,

In this dwindling glow of footlights. . .

The shadows sway timidly,

 

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The darkness stretches hesitant her arms,

Thoughts are a-cold in doubt and fear,

The dense silence of a dark age spreading mist and haze,

A sky of hard concrete.

 

Termless concepts piled somewhere beyond ken­

Pain drips in the blue mute and mystic. . .

Ages past bring down their primal stillness,

The stars make an illegible script on heaven's glowing slate. . .

 

Who has scribbled this poem unutterable and undecipherable,

Who has written down these unending ideas,

Who has painted this image of the mind, beyond understanding,

An epistle of things secret... a throbbing heart... Stars sleepless.

 

A sob sways Nature. . . the whole night

Someone is in pain, a muffled and repressed pain.

 

 

RABINDRA NATH

 

 

 

STILL I WADE THROUGH

 

His name is written on the wings of sunlight,

His thought lies a harvest field of autumn. . .

And under the sky of the ending day

Often do I lay down my head

with eyes shadow-bedimmed.

 

 

I glide into the sun-flooded waters

And I look for a shade­ –

No shore anywhere,

I trudge on foot upon dusty roads­ –

Oh, these roads of our earth.

 

Shall I find it at last shall I?

In the sun, in the fields, at the end of the day?

 

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Still I wade through billowing waters­ –

          the unmoving goal in front.

 

 

BASABI DUTT A

 

 

 

I CAN LEAVE EVERYTHING

 

I can leave everything, but not the tree;

May it remain,

Straight and simple, may the tree remain

in my life,

May it remain, remain ever wakeful.

 

I can leave everything, but not the river; May it remain,

By the side of the tree, may it remain in my life,

May it remain, remain ever wakeful.

 

I can leave everything, but not the boat; May it remain,

May the boat remain upon the river, remain in my life,

May it remain ever wakeful.

 

All I can give up, not you, O my pole-star!

You must remain – ­

Tree and river and boat, when all are swept away

in the black darkness,

Even then, do remain transfixed in the night sky.

 

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THE CENTRE OF THE BODY

 

 

The centre of this body is a sun

                      with its seven-winged flames.

Burn the strings of the body – the fire is pitiless,

       he does not know, if it is soft or hard, high or Iowa scale.

He dissolves in the fiery heat the thin cord that links me

                      to the earth.

In the heavens of your heart

I am a flying light, a flame bird.

The pair of wings is loosened by the heat­ –

The body drunk with the black smoke of gold

is sunk in a swoon­

Both lie out-stretched, the front veering upward.

 

The wandering stars in the spaces are in flight,

in flight – out of sight.

The sun has absconded, the moon a handful of ashes.

Draining life to a pale emptiness, a bunch of roses

blooms in the crimson garden of the veins,

The pupil of the eye is torn out, the tired eye-lashes

                      droop down stilled.

Time trembles with the rise and fall of the breast.

 

Life with its wings of fire is a soaring light:

Your heavens are a cloudless beauty – ­

Love and affection, memory and happiness

Are now a cascade of gold-dust, as though

drifting autumn leaves.

 

 

                                                                                   UMA DEVl

 

 

 

RAINS COME DOWN

 

Rains come down in a sudden burst,

Overcasting all the ego-skies,

The destitute traveller turns to penance and solitude:

Yesteryear's accounts are settled and closed.

 

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Tearing open the heart's poignant secrecy.

Chunks of darkness crash down,

The eye shades within it a splashing stream,

Footprints leave their echoes behind.

 

A long night stops stilled in pain,

Hard it is to forget even if one wishes to;

It lashes and breaks upon the inner soul­ –

The promise of a Sunrise.

 

 

SISIR BHATTACHARYA

 

 

 

ONE BY ONE I CATCH THE STARS

 

One by one I catch the stars

      And I bring them to touch my body one by one:

      They all turn into birds and flyaway.

 

The stars glow like fire-flies

They come and settle all over my body:

      Indeed my body is made of countless stars.

 

At long last I have found out:

        I exist no longer,

      Filled with stars, am myself a Star.

 

Take away the stars and I am no longer in the body,

      I leave my star-filled body

      And go up into the star-filled sky.

 

Now I am a heavenly star

Hence I shall become a starry heaven.

 

 

JAGADISH CHANDRA DAS

 

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I AM A SWEET FONDLING

 

I am a sweet fondling of the Sky,

I condescended to come down upon earth.

 

Whoever makes a link with me

Creates a link with the sky.

 

I am a human from the sky treading upon this mud,

At every step my anklets ring through earth's bosom.

 

Upon the soft breast of earth

I draw the very image of the sky.

 

With my tinkling anklets on

I walk through the bosom of the earth.

 

This earth is a stage for me,

I play there a celestial drama –

a true and real drama!

 

 

JAGADISH CHANDRA DAS

 

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