The Ashram of Pondicherry

INTRODUCTION

Maurice Magre (2 March 1877 — 11 December 1941) was a French poet, writer and dramatist. He visited Pondicherry in 1935 to meet Sri Aurobindo.

Maurice Magre is the author of numerous works, in particular À la Poursuite de la Sagesse (Charpentier, 1936) where he devoted a chapter to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. We should also mention the Book of Admirable Certainties (Avignon, 1941).

Magre like many others got an immediate strong impression of the atmosphere of the Asram — most feel it as an atmosphere of calm and peace, something quite apart from that of the ordinary world. He thought it was the atmosphere of the people. Besides, of the few who saw him, he saw only the best. Also many here if not most have something in their appearance different from people outside, something a little luminous, which a man of sensitive perceptions like Magre could feel. The other side becomes apparent only if one stays long and mixes in the ordinary life of the Asram or hears the gossip of the Sadhaks. People from this country, Gujaratis or others, more easily see or feel this side and do not feel the rest because they enter at once into relation with the exterior life of the Asram.

Sri Aurobindo

Letter on Himself and the Ashram > The Ashram and its atmosphere > 4 February 1937

"The divine spirit, by incarnating itself in forms, has therefore foreseen and willed everything. But then, how does it seem to pursue a goal, consciousness, since it could achieve it at the first attempt? Why did it permit the pain and evil that are in its very essence? If human evil can be attributed to men, the injustice that strikes animals and plants can only be attributed to the divine order. Why has the divine order not organized everything in joy? Pain does not always perfect and more often it throws into irremediable despair."

(Question asked by Maurice Magre)

To Maurice Magre, very kindly.

Your letter was communicated to me and the questions you posed therein were for me, at a certain period of my development, of too intense an interest for me not to take great pleasure in answering them. However, a mentally expressed answer, however complete it may be, can never be the answer, the one that silences doubts and calms the mind. Certainty can only come with spiritual experience, and the most beautiful philosophical works can never be worth or replace a few minutes of lived Knowledge.

You say: "Must a man of average development, who is no longer tormented by earthly desires, who is united to the world only by his affections, give up the hope of not being reincarnated? Is there not, after the human state, a less material state into which one passes when one is no longer recalled by desire, in the human state? This seems to me rigorously logical. Man cannot be at the top of the ladder. The animals are very close to him, is he not very close to the next state?"

First of all, what maintains the relationship with the earth is not only the desires of the vital, but every specifically human movement, and certainly the affections are part of it. One is also linked to the necessity of reincarnation by one's affections, by one's feelings, as by one's desires. However, on the subject of reincarnation, as in all things, each case has its own solution, and it is certain that a constant aspiration towards liberation from rebirths, united with a sustained effort of elevation, of sublimation of consciousness, must have as its result the cutting of the chain of earthly existences, without thereby putting an end to the individual existence which is prolonged in another world. But why think that this existence in another world, more ethereal, is "the following state" which would be in relation to man what man is to the animal? It seems more logical to me to think (and deep knowledge confirms this certainty) that the next state will also be a physical state, although a physical one that can be conceived as magnified, transfigured by the descent, the infusion of Light and Truth. All the ages and millennia of human life that have passed on earth until now have prepared the advent of this new state, and now the time has come for concrete and tangible realizations. This is the very essence of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the goal of the group that he allowed to form around him, the reason for his Ashram's existence.

For your second question,¹ I intended to send you the translation of some extracts from Sri Aurobindo's works. But when I told him that I wanted to translate passages from The Life Divine to send them to you, he replied that I would have no less than two chapters to translate if I wanted to send you a more or less complete answer. Faced with my perplexity, he decided of his own accord to write some new pages on the subject; he gave them to me very recently and I began the translation straight away.

I would not like to spoil the beautiful pages that I am going to have the privilege of translating, but while waiting to be able to send them to you, I will give you, if you will allow me, my very simplistic and succinct view of the problem.

It seems to me indisputable that the universe in which we find ourselves is not among the most successful, especially in its most external expression; but it is also indisputable that we are part of it, and consequently, the only thing that is logical and wise for us is to set to work to perfect it, to draw the best from the worst and make it the most wonderful universe there is. For, I would add, not only is this transfiguration possible, but it is certain.

May the peace and joy of Knowledge be with you.

The Mother

(English translation of original letter in French)

Lettres sur le Yoga - Part 1

'Riddle of the World'

Sri Aurobindo's letter as a response to Maurice Magre's second question.

L’énigme de ce monde

Traduction par La Mère

The Ashram at Pondicherry

In the Ashram of Pondicherry are gathered together the wisest men of the earth. They dwell in white houses that look as if they were painted with some liquid moon. There is no sign on the door that here the souls have found peace. No star of the Shepherds gleams on their terraces and the Magi-Kings do not know the way to them.

The men of the Ashram are clothed in white cotton in the manner of the Hindus and their hair is twined in a sheaf upon their backs. They carry themselves straight like the spurt of a fountain, like a flame where there is no wind and like a thought when it is true. They move between low walls, in the gardens tended with care, they converse of things of beauty and they aspire towards the Spirit. These are the Perfect Ones amongst men.

The gardens of the Ashram have not the grandeur of those of Seville or the Alhambra. But it has seemed to me that there was a supernatural element which coloured the stems and the leaves. Does a Deva of the night come perchance to paint them before each dawn? On looking up, one sees the mango and the coconut. Hibiscus-flowers, at the tips of high branches, delicate and tossing like vivid thoughts, bend down over the walls and seem to look into the street, with a touch of pride.

***

Here is a community perfect in the measure in which perfection can be of this world. Each is devoted to his favourite task, according to his knowledge and his ability. There is a workshop for the carpenter, and a room where flour is kneaded. The bindings of books shine out like swords from the shelves of the book-cases. Through the open bays one sees like great marble pieces the brows of the readers. But most do manual labour, for in the handling of matter and in the attention that one gives to it there is a method that helps the soul. No bell is there for rest, and no rigorous discipline. Each finds his liberty in the harmony of love.

All the disciples have a beauty that cannot be defined, that is not contained in a system of proportions, that sports with the science of form. From where do they receive this beauty? Was it already enclosed in the germ-cells of their parents and has it merely blossomed through the mystery of life? Or did they receive it when they brushed past the grassless ground of the seven times purified courtyards, is it only the inferior manifestation of the grace of the spirit which alighted on them when they stepped through the gate of the Ashram? Who shall ever say from what hidden spring flows the beauty of the man of goodness, detached from the world? The most crystalline waters never reveal the subterranean soil that has filtered them and none has been able to see in the midst of the rock-masses, where all is frozen and granite, the precise point where takes birth the stream chosen from the hierarchy of streams to become the Ganges.

***

Behind one of the Ashram houses there is a silent courtyard where the gardener is king. Here are the cuttings of all the plants that, in the season of their growth, have to take their place in the gardens of other houses. And there are even some choice cuttings, grace-touched, that will be on the window of the Master and give a perfect flower in which he will contemplate at sunrise the manifold beauty of the earth.

The gardener knows this and he watches with a greater love over his delicate little people. He has pots of all shapes that are the homes of his sensitive children. According to their age and their capacity of changing the wet soil into the substance of their being, he transfers them from one pot to another, offers them a ray of the sun or a jet of his watering can. Here is the supple convolvulus, the brilliant hollyhock and the gladiolus with its perpetual offering. This courtyard is like a kingdom of delicate births, tiny weanings, slow outbreaks.

By his science of the virtues that reside in the seeds, of the humid forces that flow in the stems, of the distribution of the sap and its affinity with sun and moon, the gardener is the undisputed sovereign of the little inhabitants of the earthen pots, the radiant flowers of the future, all the beauty of tomorrow.

But he does not know his royalty. His face is so pure that one sees his soul through it, and in his soul are shining all the cuttings he has brought to flower. Is it perhaps because the gardener is in contact, within his narrow courtyard, with a wisdom of plant life which manifests through the aura of each leaf? Is it perhaps because he has silently communed with the soul of infant cuttings?

***

He is the most modest of disciples and yet his modesty is combined with an aristocratic pride. He explains by turns and he keeps silent and his speech and his silence have an equal timeliness. He makes one think of a very wise mandarin of North China born of a family as ancient as that of Confucius. I see him as governor of an immense province where the people bless him because under his administration finance has prospered, the harvests have been abundant and happiness has dwell in every home. In a palace of porcelain, he handles justice as if it were a fan and he metes out with a grand severity punishments that are absolutely trifling.

When he welcomed me on his threshold, I recognised him all at once. I would have recognised him out of all the inhabitants of India. I would have wished to tell him: “You are my brother.” I believe I merely said: “Good morning, sir!” There was a touch of raillery in the depths of his eyes, the raillery one has towards those for whom one has to show some indulgence.

He dresses at times like a Hindu and at other times like a European. His true country is the world of wisdom. But it is not there that I came to know him. I came to know him in some other age and I was then younger than he. He pulled me out of trouble again and again. Out of what trouble? I cannot say. He had often to forgive me and he did it with a smile. For what fault? Who will ever tell me? But is it all memory or a trick of the imagination?

What force enables you to know a large-hearted man? I had no idea that such a man existed. Surely I shall not find his like. But it is enough that there should be one of his kind in all this space stretched between the North Pole and the South.

***

The town stands on the sea-board within a circle of lakes and palms. A fiery sun scorches it perpetually and makes the tiles of its terraces glow. One who would contemplate it from an aeroplane would see only the flat and scalded stones around the status of Dupleix and the flag of the governor. The crows are heard calling to one another and sometimes there are silences that we find in no town. The bazaar lies stretched out in the dust. At the doors of the shops corpulent Mussalmans with thick lips offer their multicoloured stuffs. A canal divides the town in two, attesting by the filth which it drags with difficulty on its dead waters the eternal division of races. All along this canal, children play during the hours of the day, and at night the phantom of cholera glides silently over the slime.

Afar, the great steamers sail at times on the roadsteads, deliver their merchandise, whistle lugubriously and depart. In the little cafés, Hindu women dance to the sound of zithers, their hands behind their heads and the body held almost motionless. And always on the roofs the crows keep talking some incomprehensible language. It is in this town that, from all the quarters of India, wise men have come to live within the shadow of the Master, a shadow that projects a spot of light.

***

If the Master’s shadow illuminates the very moment it spreads out, of what matter then is moulded his body of flesh? A body resembling that of all other men. A body that is born of women, has drunk its mother’s milk, taken food, known the intervals of sleep and on whose head has grown hair and whose fingers have nails, in remembrance of far ancestors who have scrapped the soil and torn from it their life’s nourishment. The Master has lived among men of the earth, he has been to the West, he has studied the languages and the philosophies, crossed oceans, seen various peoples, taken measure of ignorance and injustice. He has suffered the oppression of his brothers and fought for their freedom. The human wisdom that he possesses he has wrested from day-to-day life just as one wrests one’s daily bread. It is by touching the roots of sorrow, the hidden and hurting sorrow behind the figure of all manifestation, like the soul behind the body, that his eyes have grown so deep and his face hollow, like a field when it is turned by a plough. But the divine wisdom, that is above all pain and cannot take part in it, he has come face to face with it in the solitude of a prison. The four walls of his cell, like shining mirrors, have allowed him to see what is given to no man to contemplate, the mystery of causes, the path that leads to the perfect union. Still as a cypress on a day without wind, as a stone fixed to the mountain by bonds of clay, he has pursued his infinite way which knows neither a milestone nor an inn, and he has reached the goal which makes man divine: It is since then that he has lived in two different worlds, perhaps uncertain of the one in which he finds himself, perhaps surprised to be always inhabiting a physical body. It is since then that those who had a presentiment of this realisation have come to live around him like bees around a wonderful queen who bestows a honey diviner than lies within the calyxes of the most beautiful flowers.

***

I have come from the barbarous West where the machine of the metal face is king and where men sell their souls in exchange for a little pleasure. I had embarked on a great liner with bridge over bridge and with smoke-trailing funnels and with sirens that tear the heart.

I had counted the days, I had counted the hours. At Port-Saïd I saw the pirogues of the Thousand and One Nights and at a little distance I passed the battleships where the guns glittered on their platforms and the flags sent signals. On the Red Sea I crossed above the carcass of dead ships and at night I saw their ghosts floating with their extinguished fires and the faces of their dead ones, eyes open, within the portholes. I saw the beacons turning and the birds in flight. I have come like a pilgrim a trifle ridiculous with his colonial helmet for a too burning sun and with provision of quinine against fever. There were in my bags a coverlet and a fan and books for the heavy hours.

O pilgrim with greying hair, what you lack is not faith. When I was walking up and down the bridge, I found the Indian Ocean limited in comparison to my hopes. The reefs of Minicoë were mere grains of dust in a desert of darkness before the mountains of diamond which appear to my gaze in the inner sea of my soul.

O pilgrim who have fixed your moment of departure in life’s twilight, did you not know that all beauty that manifests, from the top to the bottom of this earth’s scale, in a plant or in a man, needs the leaven called youth?

***

What would Edgar Allan Poe say in the nights of Pondicherry, streaming with sweat, under the square transparent shroud of the mosquito-net?

Ten thousand crows are perched on the trees and on the roofs surrounding my house and ten thousand times they repeat, “Never more!” with that pitiless regularity which only the hands of the clocks and the stars of the sky have. Never more, never more, why? What is the sense so mortally desperate of these syllables? What is it that never more will come? Is it the gaiety of youth, the possibilities of manly force? But it has been long since I gave up this morning-heat of the blood which awakening brings you and which is sweeter than any intoxication. I have accustomed myself to hear my heart beat, measure my strength, consider my organs like the pieces of a clock-work ill-adjusted by an artisan miserly of nerves and tissues, one who has scamped his job of human construction. Is it lost pleasure, the pleasure of the body needing to exalt itself in order to escape from the void? Is it the waiting at the door which opens with a crumpling of robes, with the melancholy odour of hair? But, like the man in charge of the accessories in a theatre, I have scraped together, once the show was over, the paper bouquet, the rouge-stick and the false letter and I have consigned them to a cardboard box for the next show which will not take place.

Why do the crows repeat “Never more” in the endless night? Never more the peace of the room with books lined up, books where beauty lies hidden and can leap forth, where wisdom is at rest and does not display itself. Never more the hills bathed in sunshine, the vines which bend over on themselves, the parasol pines like offertories, the paths which slope down like old happinesses? Never more the welcoming little hotels, the friends whom one meets, the tables on the terraces when night falls? Never more the things I have loved? But no, it is not that.

What is engraved in memory comes alive the most forcefully when thought recreates it and I can, like a magician, resuscitate at my wish the miserable enchantments that have adorned my ordinary-man’s life. It is over something else that the night-crows are moaning. It is perhaps not concerned with happiness. There is a Never Moe which keeps resounding in the abyss of the soul where the consciousness has never descended. It is a lament over forgotten secrets, over beings one has known in dreams, over the beauty of landscapes in other worlds.

Oh the Never More of burning nights, how it tears, how it goes far into the possibilities of anguish, when the day is first breaking, when there are at a distance the indifferent breakers of the sea and the siren of a steamer that calls one knows not what, one knows not whom, undoubtedly death.

***

Between the Master and the disciples there is the Mother. The Mother is at the same time a woman, made of flesh and bone, with face and hair, and the metaphysical symbol of the world-soul. One invokes her as the essence of life, the animating power of things and one takes refuge in her feminine arms if a wound of the body needs tending. One sees the Mother glide over the terraces of the Ashram as fleeting as an ideal thought in a daily dream. She has established an unformulated language based on the correspondence that exists between flowers and human wishes. The giving of a flower by a disciple is enough for her to know that some disquiet has to be soothed, some prayer to be granted. The Mother is close to the Master as the shadow is behind a man and as a ray is before the mirror when it is turned towards the sun.

***

When I stood before her, it was an if an inner storm were let loose all of a sudden. It came from the depth of the soul’s horizon, with clouds of sombre thoughts and with breaths of revolt.

The Mother wears a sari of grey silk with an embroidered border and round her head a band with the same embroidery as that of the voile. Her white buskins make her feet snowy. She seems to me so small in her form and so great as a symbol! Her hands are so delicate and well-tended that one would say they were made of jewels from another planet. When she pushed the door a breath of adoration penetrated after her like a fume of sacred gold. I felt gliding up to me a dancing light which passed through my heart. But one never gets what one expects. Just as at the age of ten I started weeping after having received the wafer of holy communion, so also, hoping for serenity, I saw disorder arrive. The Spirit touched me and I knew not that it had touched.

***

Between the Master’s house and the street where men pass, there are trees. And on these each evening, with a great rustling of wings and cries of all kinds, thousands of birds alight. Never in any garden of the earth have there been so many gathered together. On all places where rise the prayers of man, there are birds that descend. For there is a secret rapport between birds and the spirit. As if the trees of the garden were blossoming in the spiritual world, all the birds of the region come to perch on their branches. But it is not for going to sleep, according to the law of creatures, when night falls. They exchange a thousand words in a language that has no contact with human speech. What they say remains ever incomprehensible to us, for they do not feel emotion either tin time or space, and the quality of the things they communicate is of another nature than our thoughts. When everything has been said, everything that the birds have to say after a day or flight over the grain-bearing earth, they lower their wings little by little, they slowly grow still. The garden of the Ashram, when the moon makes its appearance, is covered with thousands of tiny statues—beaks bent, feathers marbled.

***

What difference is there between a cricket of Toulouse and an Indian cricket?

The voice of the Indian cricket is perhaps more ringing but the spirit of their song is the same. The one that is singing in the little garden under my window is as much at ease in the shadow of a banana tree as its brother of the banks of the Garonne between the vine and the cypress. Both of them have learnt the same things while touching with their antennae different earths in which they dig similar tunnels.

To the man who hears them they speak of the happy chances of life, they promise good fortune and the evening-contentment which a calm conscience brings. All the crickets of our planet sing the same little benevolent hymn and if a cricket of genius adds somewhere a new note it is soon transmitted mysteriously to all the crickets of the earth.

I come to bear witness to one of these innovations. The cricket I am hearing this evening has struck upon an unpublished theme. It is almost a trifle, just two or three notes. I am indeed at a loss to translate them. A cricket’s song is so mysterious!

I thank the cricket of Pondicherry for the way it played on its tiny instrument. When I shall walk along the Garonne at the hour when the small farms light their lamps and poplars rustle, all the crickets of Languedoc will add for my sake to their song what the Indian innovator of genius has found, something indefinably deep, a mere nothing, the shadow of a palm, the vanished traits of an unknown brother.

***

I have crossed a part of the earth in order to draw nearer to the Divine. A child of five could have told me that this was unnecessary and that God is for ever by the side of each one. But all the children of five are wrong. Thanks to the faculty that is natural to him and thanks to the impetus of his soul, a man in his life-time can communicate with the worlds of the spirit. He makes his miraculous power radiate on those whom he loves. But he gives only infinitesimal drops, imperceptible luminous atoms. It is not because he is miserly. But the spirit, in order to be received, needs a prepared soul. Mine has gone through no preparation. Wrapped in my proud grossness I remain in the garden of the birds, I who have neither their wings nor their gift of song, I who would pose questions instead of staying on a branch and sleeping till the dawn.

***

O Master, we do not see your shadow at the window nor do we hear the noise of your steps making the ceiling resound. You sit in perfect solitude: the divine serenity, the realised ecstasy. My admiration lifts towards you in the silence of the night, towards you who have crossed the gate of perfection.

But there is a contradiction that makes me suffer and whose obsession I cannot chase away, for each of us carries his thought like a sharp sword turned towards himself and every movement of the soul causes a rending. You teach the beauty of living forms, the task of perfecting man and nature and making the world flower according to the divine law. But the divine law is not observed, men even misconstrue it, injustice reigns and evil is lord. And then, O Master, I tell myself that if you pass over the dust of the roads, if you go into the cities, placing the palm of your hand on the heart of the untouchables, surely the deaf will hear and the lepers get healed and the world realise salvation.

Ah! the evening when I have walked through the empty street by the side of the house where you live, I have passionately heard — even if I did not listen from the other side of the wall — the sob that the misery of mankind drew from you.

It was childish, I know it well. And that evening it seemed to me that I saw your tears pass through the stone like diamonds of fire and that the breath of your pity came up to me and burned my heart.

***

The ship that brought me, with its tiers of bridges and its underground machinery, is like a reduction, a microcosm of this planet.

Guided by the compass and the sextant, it goes over the sea like the earth in space, held in equilibrium by the law of attraction. And it transports many different worlds. There is the paradise of the first class where live the chosen, enjoying the presence of God, their God who is the appeaser of the hungers of their bodies.

With the smoke of cigarettes and the whiff of whisky rise the mediocre dreams of these fortunate ones. Like grotesque angels the barmen and the cabin boys run to satisfy their least desire and the orchestra sets women in evening-gowns dancing, while Mount Sinai and the dunes of Arabia are outlined on the horizon. Just as God the Father admits into a particular seventh heaven certain saints or certain meritorious lucky ones, so also the captain of the ship makes certain choice passengers climb a little iron staircase to offer them a superior whisky on the bridge that is nearer the stars.

Immediately below is the intermediate world, with the angels less diligent, an orchestra more ordinary, cabins narrower. It is the purgatory of the proud. Hardly one light chain divides them from the creatures who are the elect and who live in paradise. They could make it give way by their little finger. But this chain is strong like the prejudices of money whose symbol it is, like the power of society. Its mediocrity must be paid for in pain. The tormented ones of this purgatory do not know that their lungs suck the same air, their eyes look at the same light, they are condemned to the rack of envy.

And lower, much lower there is hell. Hell is hidden in the depths of the ship. It is invisible but everyone knows of its existence and refuses to think of it. Hence there is another humanity whose face one does not imagine, whose torture one does not wish to know. They are Arabs, it is said, or perhaps the Chinese. As in the descriptions of the catechisms, hell is a fire. The sinner is tormented by the flames. The ladder by which one descends is so hot that the hand of flesh can scarcely be put on it. Here there is the mystery of electricity with its levers, its wires and its tubes. There is an alley of metal where the air crackles and which is lined with the cylindrical masses of the boilers where the blue and red oil-fuel dances. And there live, in the darkness and the fire, anonymous beings whose eyes are hollow, whose chests are desiccated. But what fault could they have committed to be condemned to icy jets from plug-holes of air and steam from orifices of red-hot steel, condemned to hear, like the knife of a guillotine, the panel of automatic doors fall behind them?

And the ship goes on, driven by the inner power which it draws from the force of mute suffering; it transports within the circle of its armature the iron of the worlds in which no Virgil will explain to any Dante the secret causes of injustice and sorrow.

***

If I, the most egoistic of men, am touched by another’s suffering down to the roots of my being, I ask myself what it must be in your being and how the fires of sorrow have not completely burnt you up in the room where you sit. If I look at your face I see as far as one can go into the depth of pity. To have those eyes of sorrow and that tearing sadness on the features, you could not but have absorbed the misery of illness and the still greater misery of the spirit. Your body must have oozed with the ulcers of the wretched, swollen with the bloat of the leprous. Your soul has felt the dissoluteness of the unbeliever, the despair of those who know not how to love, the abysm of the suicides.

And yet you sit in your white house at Pondicherry, hear the come-and-go of the disciples, see through the window the flowers burgeoning? Are you protected by a formula that the sages have handled down since the Vedic ages? Do you conceal your self in a veil of virgin gold that the Seven Aryan Rishis wove with their hands ten thousand years ago?

Does there exist for man a protection against the sorrow of his brother? Or does one escape this sorrow by following the path of silver that leads direct to God?

***

But perhaps pity is not a high virtue. It touches on our physical senses, it moves us to our entrails, it comes almost always with an egoistic emotion. The misfortunes that strike home to us the most are those that we dread for ourselves or that we have known in the past. Our wounds, our revolts, from which we secretly draw pride as from an inner nobility, are only the passionate signs of our frenzy for life. One pities those who lack in happiness. But happiness is not life’s goal.

Fortunate is he who has been able to put himself in the region where good and evil appear like the two sides of one and the same medal, he who sees the divine presence moving in the sorrow as in the joy. Pity is for him only the memory of a time when his vision was limited and his comprehension less wide.

O divine joy of the perfection in which one touches the prime substance of creatures, is pierced by vibrations of the radiant intelligence, is merged in the ineffable love which sustains the world!

***

She [1] looked so intensely at the horizon, the horizon of the Eastern sea on which the windows of the Ashram open! When she kept herself seated in the prow of the ship, I believe I saw her prayer materialised above her like an aura of sapphire mist.

All that she told me about the life of the soul had a profound resonance. Like a magician who with a want makes flowers break open in the barren earth, she gave birth in me to beautifully coloured thoughts.

It is always doubt that one utters with the greatest of ardours, for doubt is more living that faith and more avid of utterance. But her faith was so intense that as soon as I expressed a doubt before her, she dispelled it, without vain words, with nothing save that inexpressible warmth which comes from the hearth of the soul.

But a fire of such a nature, does it not get burnt up just because one warms oneself with the flame? According as my faith increased, it seemed to me that there was something in her which grew faint. And when my aspiration towards the spirit reached its highest point, a breath of dryness passed over her and brought her a mysterious despair.

Doubt is a sickness of the soul which periodically returns like certain fevers. O Master, cast a look on her who has generously poured the invisible riches. Penetrate her with your creative thought so that from now on she may carry certitude just as a warrior carries an enchanted sword by which he is saved from evil. Grant her the talisman which gives the unchangeable virtue of belief. It is she who deserves the gift of the Master, if it is true that faithful hearts should be the first and that sincere enthusiasm is superior to all knowledge.

***

[1] Here the author seems to refer to one who accompanied him to Pondicherry as secretary and nurse.

In the order that reigns in the Ashram one feels admiration for the divine work. The work portioned out to each, the glances filled with quietude, the form of the shadow projected by the tree, everything proclaims obedience to law. Happy the one who can find the divine law beautiful, the law that since the aggregation of the first atoms has willed the triumph of the strongest. Sometimes I happen to say to myself: If I were God!

All my efforts would have consisted of contradicting the order of things. I would have given sap to the trees during the winter so that the fruits might appear under the snow and that it might make them fall by the bursting of their warm flesh. I would have given to the solitary man the surprise of finding a thin-bodied virgin in his empty bed. The servant would have seen his work ended before having begun it. To one who is avid of beauty I would have brought dreams so splendid that he would keep lying down until he died, for fear of interrupting them. According to my capacity as God I would have prevented man from degrading himself. A God cannot reform the world but He can help to better it by supernatural creations. Baseness comes from pride and it comes from misery. I would have lowered the pride of the powerful by peculiar miracles and they would be stripped of their dresses and their houses as the butterflies emerge from their chrysalises to become winged beings. I would have breathed into the heart of miserable creatures such a hunger for beauty that they would have laid aside their tools, their brushes, their sacks of coal to see how a flower blooms or what grace the clouds have when they stretch across the setting sun. I would have mastered the sexual energy which blinds the clear-sighted and makes four-footed those who before were standing on two feet. I would have castrated them and made them learn the inutility of reproducing themselves and of spreading upon the planet beings condemned to pluck bitterly their sustenance without ever thinking of their souls. I would have fixed myself to the earth in order to transform it so forcibly that I would have felt against me the palpitation of its substance; I would have clasped the hearts of men with a love so puissant that I would have moved them to a love equal to mine. O the mad dream of being God!

***

The Buddha teaches that we should escape from the wheel of lives and re-enter most swiftly the bosom of God and not occupy ourselves with the magnificent curve in which the creatures are put forth.

You contradict this ancient sage, this reformer of personal views. God, you say, has not organised with an infinite prevision the descent of life into matter, from the dull rock to conscious man, so that man may profit by this consciousness in order to escape from the law and return by a short cut to the primary source whence he started. It is thus the lamb does, hardly desirous of skipping in the sunlit hills; it returns, when the dog is inattentive and the shepherd sleeps, to the stable where it can dream at ease. But why is the lamb not right in preferring the prairie of its dreams to the hard rockpath where short grass grows and it bruises its delicate hooves? The work of God is immense and the curves He traces are of infinite variety. Certain comets trace limited ellipses around the suns whose satellites they are, while others lose themselves in the infinite without the astronomers being able to calculate their return. Are we not in the right to consider earthly evil and its visible aggravation even by our uncertain standards as the sign that we must retrace our steps?

The divine creation does not develop with surety. It resembles the work of an architect who makes attempts, builds and demolishes without any care for the materials he uses. There have been grotesque species, which had organs not adapted for living and which the Creator had given up sustaining. There have been over-prolific ones which exceeded His plans by their pullulations and which he had to destroy by means beyond natural laws. Why should not the human creation end in an impasse whose sorrow, injustice and falsehood would be the Mané, Thecal, Pharès, warning the souls that they must find in themselves the resource of their salvation?

“Evil is incomprehensible,” you reply, “for a human intelligence and one should be much farther and much higher in order to seize the necessity and the benefit.” But it is a strange paradox unworthy of God who has willed it. What is the better part of us, what is divine, revolts against this explanation. One cannot shut up a prisoner and make him suffer in the prison, telling him that these torments have an origin which has to remain incomprehensible to him and which he must bless in spite of this. Or if these torments have a cause to which he has himself given rise in previous lives, how should we judge a Creator who has taken away the memory of these causes and in consequence the possibility of modifying them, who has made man responsible for chastisement and unresponsible for redemption? “One has not the right to judge the Creator,” you will say. But why? Since He has willed that with the human reign there should appear a faculty of judgment. Unless this faculty has been born despite Him, unless He has been, at some minute of the cosmic ages, like one who sowing the wind reaps the whirlwind, like one who playing with fire forgets the power of his creation and lights in his own dwelling a flame which he cannot any more extinguish.

***

You have penetrated the wisdom of books and of traditions. You have made a tour of the sciences like Aristotle and of metaphysics like Shankara, and after having followed the immense circle of human knowledge you have leapt towards the supreme essence of the spirit like a jet of water that is urged by a formidable hidden pressure and carries in itself the spirit of solar rays. You have crossed the invisible world of illusions as a dauntless swimmer crosses a gulf full of monsters, dispersing them with his breath. And now you are stripped of fear, enveloped in calm, concealed in serenity. You keep yourself in the midst of your disciples’ love like a unique rose around which the foreseeing gardener allows only delicate grasses to grow.

How could you deceive yourself, you who have touched the Divine, you who have gained the experience of what is above human reason? And yet I cannot prevent myself from remembering that the Buddha told his disciples to believe nothing beyond what they had understood with their own inner faculty, what was of the divine essence.

***

In the country from which I come, one does not worship the spirit. Hardly a few men, in the monasteries, practise methods analogous to yours by glorifying the prophet who was born in Judaea. I do not shave my head, as is their practice, I am not dressed in rough serge, I have not sung their canticles. I dreamt of a light for which the cloisters have too much shadow and the basilica too much sadness.

Once only in my childhood I grazed the mystery of solitude and of the Presence. It was not far from Toulouse, the town where I was born, in a country where all is sweetness and half-tint and where nature is like a child that has never been ill-treated by its father. On the bank of the Garonne where the poplars grow, there is a great house of stone. When I had run up to it, I stopped, seized by the silent beauty of the landscape. And suddenly I saw, emerging from a pathway, men clothed in robes and looking into themselves. They were walking gravely. They were going nowhere. They disappeared among the trees. A clock struck six. I have not been able to forget them.

The men whom I see here do not resemble them at all. They have more love for the sun and for living nature. I feel closer to them than to the others. And while I have seen them walking under the trees where there were so many singing birds, I have not been able to check myself from dreaming of those men of Toulouse who were passing under the poplars when the clock struck six and whose prophet had been crucified.

But towards these or towards those, I have gone too late or too early. It is one’s youth that one should offer to the Divine. Fortunate are those who rise at dawn and have reached the end of the course before sunset. When I crossed the threshold of the Ashram, there was a form which barred the way. It stretched out its arms and said: “Turn back your steps! It is too late!” And this form it was myself who created. In the gladness of arrival I had passed by it, seeming to ignore it, but it has pursued me step by step, it has kept by my side and always it has whispered in a low voice, with a great deal of melancholy: “Turn back your steps, it is too late!”

***

The men in rough serge, who walk under the poplars of Toulouse, have too melancholy songs. The organ has always moved me to despair. I am penetrated with the joy of life and cannot bear human injustice.

Torn by this contradiction, I am tossed between my admiration for the forms of earth and my revolt against their suffering. When I see the trees in cluster lifting harmoniously towards the sun, like chalices of sap and leaves, I wish to be only a branch and share in such a surge. When I see a stunted bush writhing among dry stones, straining towards an ungracious universe the anger of its thorns, I want to give it my blood if it can change it within its substance into a bit of fresh greenness.

But I am crushed by the immensity of law and I ask myself why I have been given this faculty of accepting it when I cannot modify it in the least? How to get out of these two opposed ideas that answer to each other like the sound and the echo, like the beatings of a clock, like day and night? Should one admire nature and hurl oneself gladly like a swimmer who follows the current of a river, letting himself be carried by the waters and getting drunk with the beauty of the banks? Or should one believe in the word of a host of saints who have rejected the temptation, revolted against Evil, prepared themselves their cross, loved better to be flayed alive than to bow before God?

O Master, if you know, resolve for me the problem, utter the liberating word, the word that makes the inner chains fall. If in the mysteries of Samadhi you have caught a glimpse of the truth, if you know why man is on the earth, what sense has the face of beauty, what sense has the grimace of grief, whether one should love them equally, say it and your word shall make the universe ring, it shall rejuvenate it to its foundations. For the truth is divine. There cannot be any calm for the disciple, even though he take ten million breaths attuned to the rhythm of the stars, if he knows not why creatures have been thrust upon the planet, to live there, to decompose there and be reborn.

***

O Master, it is not possible that there should be no redemption for a man of the West! I do not have the pride common to those of my race. It has been for a long time that I have regretted not having been born with a bronzed face, near a temple where I would have performed rites since my childhood and where I would have obtained naturally what I seek with so much pain. Out there, I am solitary in the midst of men. I do not understand them any more and I feel that they have ceased to love me because I am no longer like them. But here I am a stranger. The language and the dress create an insurmountable barrier. I should like to cry out my love for men and for things and I remain an indifferent personage who pronounces banal words. But this again is nothing. You have given me a welcome most magnificent. The room is very beautiful and the food very rich and the servant very zealous.

I have visited all the rooms of the Ashram and all the doors have been opened to the guest. But there is one invisible room which has neither door nor walls and which is the room of the Spirit. Within that, I have not been admitted. If I were worthy of entering it, there would be no need to demand and I would find myself there by the power of wishing. I know my unworthiness and I have gauged the distance which separates me from a goal of which I have not even a glimpse; but is there not an instruction which you give to some people? As one who reaches the summit of a high mountain throws a rope to those who are remaining in the valley, you should throw some marvellous words to fill the soul with happiness and allow it to raise itself.

O Master, make these words resound for me. I know that the voices which go from below can always be heard, thanks to the force which sound has, and that no prayer is lost. And I know that the voice from on high has a tendency to rise and is not perceived by the deaf who are houses below. I need a sublime order, an instruction which falls like a luminous stone, a teaching come from the summit. Tell me how the spiral of meditation should climb up, give me a formula of prayer, even a syllable to which I would cling like a swimmer who has found a buoy. I am one who is deaf and still wishes to hear, who is blind and yet opens wide the eyes. Make one sign from your side, a tiny bit of it can save me from despairing of salvation.

***

Perhaps I have understood the secret. He who has mounted cannot redescend, even if he wishes it with his heart of old times. He who has attained the house of wisdom cannot re-open the marble gate, even if there is someone who begs, on a stormy evening, in a desperate tone. Just as we do not bother ourselves whether the water of marshlands is vivifying enough to let tadpoles grow harmoniously into frogs, so too he who has access to divinity cannot soil his feet any more in the marshes of men.

I knock at the marble gate. Never has the night been so thick. Never has the wind blown with such tumult. Is it not already much to have discovered this gate across the shadow, even if one has to die by the perfection of its whiteness?

O Master, what is the sign by which to recognise the one who ought to enter, the one who is permitted to receive the transmission of the Spirit? Is he chosen by virtue of an incomprehensible grace or does he choose himself by the ardour of his faith and the purity of his love?

***

O Mother, while your hands of a Sheherazade are stretched in the half-light of the hall of elevations for the benediction of disciples, the invisible Presences stand by your side.

Then the souls mount in a group, disengaged from the body’s form, and by this grace that comes from you they have the faculty of uniting.

I have seen them, at the twilight hour, like a cloud of radiant beauty, rise towards the tranquil sky, lift high in a single sheaf, when the birds go to sleep, when the stars begin to appear.

As long as your hands are outstretched, like two symbols of adoration, the souls of all the disciples are united in love of the Master, they taste the beatitude and the perfection of love.

And when you sweetly lower your hands there is an invisible separation, the beautiful Egregore of the bluish gold fades and comes back to the earth, all the souls return to their earthly form, as the colours of a rainbow, after having shone in a circle, become again mist and azure.

***

O Mother, I have not risen with the chosen ones and the blessing has passed by me. But, in the measure of his sincerity, has not each the right to a little bit of love?

It is part of the attributes of your power to help the men who appeal to you at the beneficent hour of death. And this hour is like a cloud that sails round my sky without moving farther or disappearing.

O Mother, when this hour comes for me, may my breath have strength enough to pronounce the syllables of your name; may my memory be lively enough to build up your exact image within the shadows of remembrance!

May you keep by my side like a seraph of pity and dispel before me the ensnaring people of the shadows! May you lead me, stripped of fear and pride, towards the abode where the pure ones go, where all is love and beauty!

***

I shall depart loaded with a precious treasure. I have not gained the answer which I came to seek. But the great masters answer not to the questions of men. Jesus and Buddha kept silent and they have taught that it was vanity to know. Perhaps the supreme wisdom is to limit the vision to the span of what one sees. Perhaps there is even a higher wisdom which lies in not seeing.

On the most sacred soil of the world I have come to seek that which I name the Truth. I have beheld men good and pure and such as I did not know could exist. They have had merely to stand before me to attest by their presence that there is no wisdom superior to uprightness of heart. I am going a thousand times brimmed. I feel myself marked by an elective grace. I am like him who has gone to quest for gold and who brings back a stone precious like one that can only be in the planet Venus. It is because somewhere, in the dark world, there is this beauty of the soul, because some men have uplifted themselves silently towards perfection, that all men can be saved.

***

I have taken a handful of earth, a handful of the earth of India, to carry it for remembrance in my own country. I have looked at this earth in the hollow of my hands. It was exactly like the earth of a field of Toulouse, which I took when I was a child and which I ran between my fingers. All the earths resemble one another. All are made of the primitive substance and of the reuse of dead plants. But the spirit is different. What I should have carried was a little of the eternal light whose ray has descended here. I have come quite close to it. But the light of a divine order has this subtle quality of passing without leaving a trace. Has it perhaps touched me? How shall I know, my God? Oh if I have carried merely this handful of earth in the hollow of my hand, this handful of Indian earth so like the earth of other countries!

***

I was going to leave and someone carried my baggages across the rooms and along the staircase. I saw a man who was naked with a loin-cloth. He prudently kept apart and lowered his eyes while joining his palms all the time my look met his. There was under these traits a strange joy and the illumination of perfect beings. I thought of some saint come at the last hour for a marvellous communication.

“What is this man?” I asked with an inner emotion the servant who acted as my interpreter, “and what does he want?”

The servant answered: “He has come to know that you are leaving for France and he wishes to get a bit of money on this occasion.”

I kept silent and then my soul was filled with joy. If the face of the beggar and that of the saint wear the same beauty it is because to give and to receive are two actions of the same essence, which only seem different to eyes that do not know how to see.

O Master! through the intermediary of one who asked me for an offering, your message has reached me!

***

O Master, you have not cured the leper, you have not delivered the woman possessed nor ostensibly walked on the waters. By the path you have discovered in the inner labyrinth of the spirit, you have reached the realm of the Divine. No Lazarus has risen from the tomb to bear witness to your power, no miracle has flashed forth like a celestial aerolite. But a few inspired men have known that the miracle has taken place in silence and solitude and they have come to gather around you. With the souls of these perfect ones you have condensed a spiritual diamond of such purity that the earth has not known its like. What pride would be required of me to believe that I could mingle with these perfect ones or rather what ignorance would be required! Now my soul will turn back eternally to the place of election where you live and each night it will perch on the trees of the Ashram, lost in the thousands of birds that sleep with folded wings and fly off at dawn.

***

These are words which one uses and whose sense one understands only very late. One pronounces them a thousand times without knowing their value. And all of a sudden these vague words become alive in front of you, as if they had blood in their letters and flesh in their syllables.

Ah! how poignant they are and nostalgic, charged with all the distress of my soul, these words which have remained up to now mute and lack-lustre, these words which have just revealed themselves to me in their profundity of despair, these words of “Lost Paradise”!

***

I would wish there were more than five parts of the world and that the oceans were more numerous. It is not enough to have one China and it is not enough to have one India! I would wish there were several pole-stars and a whole pack of Great Bears. How swift go the ships! How equal are the shores! How deceptive is the Southern Cross! The sharks are too few and the flying fishes fly hardly enough to make a parade of their little power of leaping. Faintly lit, the cities fade out and all the ports dwindle. The gulfs are thin like serpents, the islands have not the air of being water-ringed on all the sides and the revolving lighthouses are so low that one thinks always that they are on the point of being extinguished. The beauty of the world is less great than what one has dreamed in writing books of travel. One sole lamp is bright and shall not ever pale for all its smallness, scarcely a dust-grain of gold above the night of the oceans. It is the lamp of the pure spirit which needs no oil once it has been lit!

O ship, you can sail and carry me towards no matter what world, even beyond the Red Sea and beyond Greece, towards the country where reigns the fog and where turns the machine! There, on the shore that I leave behind me, is a man garbed in white who bears aloft a lustre for me despite the rain and the glooms which have suddenly spread. He makes a gesture of farewell, the gesture of a brother to a brother. I have no need to open the eyes in order to see him and the farther away I move the more brilliant grows his light.